“Of Scattered Leaves and the Sprawling Self” – a poem by Michael L. Newell

January 24th, 2025

Of Scattered Leaves and the Sprawling Self

When wind scatters leaves, and thoughts sprawl
across memory’s vast landscape in a wild array
of color and form and incident which has shaped

who and what I am, I take a walk and watch
the young and old making sense out of chaos
through the use of rake and shovel and bin

into which all the colorful debris is deposited, as I
have deposited a lifetime into heart and memory,
thought and dream; and like the generations

together cleaning yard, road, and sidewalk,
in a quest for order and visual clarity, I journey
through decades in a search for why and who

and what I was and what I have become, but I find
it more comforting to leave the clutter, the apparent
anarchy of memory intact, as I return each face

and event, triumph and disaster, love and betrayal,
to its appointed place in the wild disarray that has been
my life, my habits of thought, my definition of self — yes,

that most of all, all that I have done, as wildly unshaped
and apparently unfocused as it has been, is the slapdash picture,
the cartographer’s nightmare, the sprawling scrawl that is my life;

my life is freeform jazz, rules and patterns only apparent after
the fact, is the improvised language of a street beatnik,
and I rejoice in accepting this unruly self.

___

Michael L. Newell lives on the Atlantic Coast of Florida. His most recent book of poems is Passage of a Heart.

Listen to Phineas Newborn, Jr. play the Matty Malneck/Frank Signorelli/Mitchell Parish composition “Stairway to the Stars”