"No One Knows"

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"
-Paul Valery


This is, I think, the state I want to abandon this poem in. I'm titling it "No One Knows" or "Uncertainty". I'm still not sure what I want to call it. You could give me suggestions if you want. I spent a long time with just the first two stanzas written (and slightly different) not knowing what exactly I was going for in this poem. It was in some ways an idea without any background to lend it meaning.

I see before me a locked door encased in a splendid mansion
I have been through every open room (and they were all magnificent)
But this is an expansion which utterly befuddles my mind;
I am bent upon the questions of, “What if . . .?”, “What if . . .?”
Sometimes my mind seems like a log that is made to drift.

No man has the gift to break down this oaken door, and I have not the key.
But I know the cool air that bleeds from under its threshold;
I have felt it in the breeze that runs beneath the shelves of an old bookstore.
The cold dead breeze that once flew around Edgar Allan Poe as he wrote
His “Raven” evermore breathes monotonous death from underneath that door.

It is the air of uncertainty that kills many a conversation,
( “Who could know what such a cryptic comment means?”)
One would find more certainty in a bustling Station. But this place. . .
Here there are reams of scribbled paper but nothing linking it together,
Trace the lines and you will find no picture whatsoever.

No one knows.