Rejection Slip Away
So what do you aspire to?
Your own little Walden Pond?
Your own minute patch of solitude
where you fold into yourself
and turn your back on humanity?

I guess you figure that
immolating Therou’s lack of
social interactive skills
will place you on some higher level.

Say we follow his isolative lead.
Say we embrace his dismissive ideals.
Say we all turn our backs on our fellow man
in an attempt to become one with our, um,
fellow man.
Well, how many Walden Ponds are there?

What we have here is a multitude of souls
who have chosen to step off the map;
plummet over the edge;
fall away, and deep freeze as
their own little unique snowflake selves.
There they alight upon
icy ponds of indifference,
little realizing that there just next to
their one and only Walden Pond
is another Walden Pond.
And next to that:
another.
Our private properties all butt up,
one to another.
It’s suburbia out there.
A gridlock of Walden utopia.
Or is that dystopia?

You figure this is your
one great act of civil disobedience.
What? To
turn you back on us?
To walk away,
pass through a tree line and
fade away into your own
custom made forest of obscurity?

And there you stand at
Walden Pond Version Three Thousand,
Six Hundred and Eighty Two,
tossing forth deep ruminations.
Ponderous depth charges that
makes an impressive splash, but…
Let’s face it.
Your ripple goes no farther than water’s edge.
A water’s edge that you defined for yourself.

There in the forest,
you are the proverbial sound of
one hand clapping.
There in the forest,
you are that tree which falls.
The one that no one hears.

Like you,
I also stand at water’s edge,
and yet
my vista of liquid reflection is
far vaster.
Here before my feet,
a myriad of individuals
have pooled their unique fluid minds
into this basin of mutual acceptance.
Where your pond grows stagnant,
here currents surge and flow, to and fro.

There beneath the surface,
an immense swell rises.
Downward, a deep trough forms.
Just there, an upward curve—
a wall of shimmering… words.
Words followed by…
this sound.

A reverberation you will never hear
there in the seclusion of your
tiny Walden ideal.
For this is an aural assault that amounts to
a bit more than
one hand clapping.

Yes. Here we are ocean,
and from fifty fathoms we rise
each as one.
And there we crest, roil, pitch forth and fall.
Soon to crash upon this incandescent shore.
A million lyric liters of thought pounding
an equal number of sandy synapses.
Surf to sand and out again.
Each and every one of us,
riding that mighty wave of
applause.

©06 Jack Hubbell