There lived a man with weary feet,
Who walked through streets both cold and bleak.
His eyes had lost their final song,
And in his pockets, grief belonged.
A hound followed him, thin and true,
Through rain and mud the whole night through.
“Why do you not love?” the old hound said.
“Because,” he sighed, “love left me dead.”
The hound bowed low and said no more,
For some pains need no words at all.
He sat beside the man in rain,
While smoke curled softly from his pain.
Then came a crow upon the roof,
Black as the past, grim as the truth.
“I knew you once, before the years,
When hope still lived behind your tears.”
The man replied with lifeless eyes,
“Hope is merely pain in disguise.
I planted dreams and watered them with love;
They grew as weeds beneath the sky above.”
A fox appeared beside the lane,
With clever eyes and words like rain.
“My friend, to live, you must learn when
To hide your wounds and smile again.”
The man looked down, then softly said,
“That was the lesson that left me dead.
They taught me how to smile when I cried,
And say ‘I’m well’ when something died.”
The crow spread wide his midnight wings:
“Then surely, man, your heart still sings?”
The man stood still beneath the moon:
“I cannot tell. Perhaps too soon.”
The hound then rose and touched his hand,
As though some love might still withstand.
The fox just laughed, “What foolish art,
To keep believing in a broken heart.”
The man looked down upon the three,
Unsure of what he ought to be.
He could not hate, nor love, nor grieve;
He only knew how to survive and leave.
He was a man without a taste,
No wine, no salt, no sweetness, waste.
A shadow wearing human skin,
Who could not tell where he had been.
And when the night consumed the road,
The hound remained beside his load.
The fox went home beneath the moon,
The crow flew off and vanished soon.
The man walked on through morning grey,
With nothing left to lose or say.
And should you ask him why he grew
So tasteless, cold, and hollow too,
He'll lower his eyes and softly say:
“I was not born without a flavour.
Life was simply my teacher.”