Where is Spoon River (4)

This is what happens when you think too much...

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Stephen, the Musician

Passers-by, reflect and consider...
The gods shall endow us with embryonic tools for our use
To assemble a life and a path.

For the carpenter, braces and shaving planes,
For the cobbler, the pegs and awl,
For the shopkeeper, ledgers and shelves.

For the banker, keen fingers and an eye for gain,
For the farmer, strength to wrest sustenance from barren prairie fields,
For the orator, a shiny tongue of Panglossian appeal.

For the artist, pigments and brushes,
For the poet, language, rhythm, and shades of meaning,

For the musician, dancing notes of color, depth and weight-
non-corporeal violins, piccolos, horns, and bassoons-
swirling in a cacophonous aerial ballet of unheard possibility.

These god-endowed tools shall reside in our heads!

But the tools of mere mortals,
perseverance, diligence, dedication and loyalty,
The tools that cause the quickening of hands-

These man-worshipped tools shall lurk in our hearts!

But I was born inexplicably with music in my heart-
And the tools of mere mortals residing incongruously in my head
Were confiscated by strangers wearing the selfish robes of...
Mentors!
Who with the certainty of the insular
Tried to compel my life and my path.

From the chemist, chalk and fire,
From the doctor, medicinal elixirs and omnipotence,
From the professor, inflexibility and infallibility,

From the lawyer, the precedent, the cruelly twisted logic-
the book, the whig, the obscured agenda-
the spectral comrade of mutual convenience.

I could no more deny the banshee-keen of their leaden demands
Nor dull my misplaced mortal tools of helpless compulsion
Than I could cut music from my heart!

So my hands and arms withered and disappeared,
In a weary bi-brachial waltz towards the Plain of Lethe.
Like sand eroded from the banks of Spoon River,
Washed in surrender to the Father of Waters.