Love the feel of iron to the touch. It’s genetic for sure.  You touch it’s cool metal and watch it shine or glow. You feel the temperature, so slow to rise and catch your own. Heft the weight of it and understand it’s hardness for something mind bending and banging down wrought your Imagination. When it comes to rust though, it’s the weather and age that starts it’s decline.  A red mirage of it’s strength remains.

Remember machine how you art rust and unto rust you must return. Long forgotten machinery. Sitting there, with no oil, no attention, and no care.  The machine’s work is gone.  It’s lonely there, rusting slowly to a death of red.

Red rust is the outback of Australia, how the oceans rusted bad back before it all began, where the watery iron ions sat waiting and came out as red dirt for the land to occupy. A land occupied by iron tools on a red horizon full of flakes of past imaginings, past hopes, past dreams.

How my mind feels like that steel trap, which one day will lose it’s sparkle and spring. Which one day will be there rusting in spots and flaking off into the dirt of the past, for others to tread all over.

How my mind is a field of red rusty dirt just waiting for outback rain ready to bring sparkle and surprise to an ancient wandering.

— cjs – jan – 2013