I Cannot Understand This Thing Called Soul

I cannot understand this thing called soul.
It is, I’m told, essentially,
a ghost in a machine.

But if it is, does it have hands
that crank,
or feet that pedal turn
the wheels and cogs
that constitute the mechanism that it haunts?

If souls are, as is generally assumed,
something immaterial, dimensionless,
comprised of nothing that a body has,
do they possess
capacity to grasp, to feel,
to sense the steel
(or fleshy parts) believers say
that they manipulate?

If yes, how so,
since only solids, things from atoms carved,
are able to connect
with solid things?

To me this soul "thing" is
a contradiction.  It's
a hoary old Platonic fiction, not
to be accepted or believed.

And if you were to open me
to find this “soul” which, so it’s claimed,
resides “inside” my bodily abode
and lives within
the circumscription of my flesh,

(and yet how can a thing
with no extension, says Descartes,
take up or fill some space
or have a face, a trace, locatable?)

what could I then expect to find
if it is truly  "thing" and “there”?.
What is it I’d be looking for?

I am not sure, nor are,
I wager, firm believers too.

It is, I think, the “soul”,  a metaphor,
for something else.

And so I also think I'll show,
most metaphorically of course,
this "thing" called "soul"
that I'm supposed to “have”
(or is it the reverse?)
the exit door.