The Walnuts

Since I’ve run out of stories to tell,
I go at last to the cupboard
and pull out the bag of walnuts
and a hammer.

Laid out before me on the floor,
lined up on butcher paper,
points facing away so there will be no
projectile damage from the blows,

they await my creativity.  I raise the tool
and bring it down on the one to the far left,
choosing the order in which I would read
a book if a book required violence of me.

Inside is the whole meat, which predictably
looks to me like a brain.  I see the walnut
as a brain, meaning that my brain
sees itself in the walnut, as we are creatures

of comparison.  Yet I did not think at once
of the whole nuts as skulls, curiously.  Despite
the all-encompassing violence of the process,
there’s a break in the perception.  Perhaps

I can find a source in literature which will illuminate
the source of the dissonance.  I go at once to the bookcase
to seek examples in literature of walnuts being compared
to skulls, and find (of course) many with a brain metaphor

and none with a skull metaphor.  I go back to the nuts
and stare at the next one, trying to see a face, a reflection
of humanity, something to hang a meaning on…nothing.
Nothing at all comes to mind.  Now, I’ve got a dilemma:

should I continue cracking these walnuts
if I have no social, existential, philosophical,
grounds to work from when I observe them?
I’m just a man, after all; how will I know anything

about the walnuts if I can’t see myself in them?