Old Tears Wanted

I wonder what happened to the tears I didn't cry
What they turned into, sediments or bones

Put on an explorer's cap, kakhis and a shovel
Now,
Go for a hike inside myself

Will I work my thumbs?
Will I stop in flashy diners with dull strangers
Or vice versa?
Is it long highways,
my inner landscape
Or a tropical jungle, a soft underbelly
A ticklish child, a mountain of broken china
Archetypes of old, ripe valleys untold
Temper tantrums swallowed whole
Like ostrich eggs
A billowy she-bear sleeping in a hole of candy
A swarm of bees from the North Pole?
Am I mountains or caves?
Ocean or tundra?
What is my inner temperature?
Funny I never cared to check
Funny I never tried...
But most of all, where are the tears I never cried?

A school of orphans used to live here long ago
The peasants would say
And when they left, the land dried up

Some would have seen a flock of old maids
Flying south into the sun
White wings stiff with arthritis

Maybe the salt mines to the east harbor them
Or they turned into dry sticks
Travellers make fires with

Maybe they hide in various closets
Forgotten like old socks
Or they dance the limbo
While drinking martinis on the rocks
on a Caribbean-cruising yacht

Have they truly left me?
Or will I discover a humid cave
and glass panes foggy with condensation?

What truly worries me though
is the Dam.
I'm sure they made one
Because now I can't cry at all.
Oh, I get the occasional leak from time to time
In extreme cases of torture, raw onions and soaps
But I lost my cry-baby persona in the bathwater