This one starts out using internal and off rhyme well but largely drops that until the end, with the near rhyming "coat" and "hope," creating a nice finality. But the end confuses me. Is it the body that is skipping along? If so, how, given that it is a bedraggled thing? Anyway, a fun poem with a lightness.
The Book of Life
Pale and naked without their bodies, the souls
examine the book
in which they hope to find
their names inscribed.
Made of soap. Now. Made
of smoke. Now
made of dew
and hairlessness. And how
primitive, I realize, seeing them, it's been:
The body. Its
silly limbs transporting, through the world, our
windblownness. Our
cloud wherever it went.
Teeth, old-fashioned and enameled, so
easily chipped.
The nose, often
runny, sometimes broken.
Heavy eyelids. Ankle twisted. How
did we bear it as it bore us, all
stuttering and limping, clomping, hungry,
shaggy, horny, and diseased. All
that meat—grossly, morosely—weighted
around a soul:
A simple soul!
Exhausting coat!
Skipping along like hope.
Speak,soul.
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