A Story No One Told

Picture life etched in stone;
Life sketched in poems
On sidewalks in dry chalk, next to homes.
Picture
All you've left alone
And kept in reflections shown:
Your dome sketched in subjective tones.
Picture life on a sidewalk,
Frame it so all view;
All you've ever felt,
Try to name it.
It's called, "you."
Picture it
In the space between steps.
It's the grace between breaths
And the message in this make believe text.
Picture...

God exhaled.
The moon shivered in a blue river.
Stardust fell
Through space, released, and gave its peace
To a man in his place beneath,
Graciously as he laid asleep,
Draped in sheets
With his honest wife in the gold days of his old age.
And on this nice August night,
His soul raised.
He saw this light --
The calmest bright --
Like Coldplay.
It was all yellow and in its gold rays, he saw his plight as it
Showed him the youth that he forgot about,
Like how he blocked the spout on his house's hose and not let the water out.
He thought it out and wondered how he remembered it all;
How, younger, he entered the halls,
When summer surrendered to fall.
Then he wondered, was his life through?
In slumber, under this bright moon?
Like skies after thunder, the light grew
And more from the limitless stash of images flashed
And poured from the reservoir to mimic his past.
He saw himself with his wife, growing old;
His children's lives.
He filled with pride as the light showed his soul,
Then its brilliance died.

And it was dead-black in his eyes.
A voice said that it was time,
But he was steadfast in his mind,
So he said back in reply,
"Please! Seeing my life like this,
It made me think
I could state, succinctly, everything life is if you gave me ink.
I could maybe print
Every speech and thought and release my plot
On these streets I walk,
With a piece of chalk;
To paint the sharpest image of a heart.
'Cause as much as art can mimic,
Nothing's as real as a life told from start to finish."

Suddenly, the man awoke with a violent cry
That, strangely, didn't seem to disturb the silent sky.
His wife was still beside him, the blanket enclosed,
And when he looked up at the clock,
He saw the hands, and it froze.
So the man just arose,
Put his hands to the roads,
And began to compose the most candid of prose.

So he wrote every quote spoken
And left every breath kept,
Sketched in the next step of concrete,
Then death crept and led him to his bed.
As the sun began to rise,
He titled his surprise,
"The Story of the Man that Died."
Then his wife and the townsfolk awoke and were shocked
First by his passing,
But then by what he wrote with his chalk.
They got the roads blocked by a flock of postmen and cops.
He wrote from his lot to the edge of town, close to the docks,
Where he used to watch the boats
And often joked with his pops.
His folks had not long ago passed
And now both, with him, walk.
People came from everywhere,
They read the story through for days.
It wasn't nothing new or strange till they were moved and amazed.
It wasn't the places he'd been
Or the people he'd met;
It was the spaces between
And the secrets he kept.
They wept joyfully for the greatest story no one told:
It was just the story of an ordinary man growing old.