Concerning the Soul

by Brett Rutherford

Because you dream
of parents gone,
dead siblings, the face
and voice and sayings
of a wise grandmother,

you imagine them alive
somewhere, solid, fine,
and feasting as never
they fed in a starved life,

 or as flimsy ghosts
in a tinsel harp heaven
where white-toast angels
attend them, all this

 in desperate wish
that you had a soul
and would travel with it
to the same beyond.

Wishing does not
make it so. The soul,
subtracted, is not the line
between a body
and a corpse.

The soul is a word
denoting no thing
existent in time
or space, an object
of language only.

No thing is
Nothing, and from Nothing
it is not permitted to say
that something comes.
Of Nothing, no substance,
quality or power adheres.

Note how a fool is made
by adding a capital letter
to lower-case nothing —
nothing, null, zero,
Nothing, ah sublime,
extant omnipotent —
as though to kick upstairs
the non-existent into
a respectable place.

Like floating reefs
or fatal Sirens,
beware the lure
of floating abstractions!