My thirty five year old hands
Remember the feeling of freshly cut grass
Cascading through my ten year old fingers
Like the crystal waters of a holiday stream,
As broad leaves darkened into summer
Under warm spring skies.

As I ponder prepubescent plans and
Adolescent ambition in the harsh light
Of adult interrogation, I will do my best
To go bald gracefully as I try to regain
Enough of my lost patience and perseverance
To prove him (and myself) wrong.

Age has not slowed the torrent of ideas that,
Every so often, can still flood my mind;
Nor has it brought a longed for ability
To turn imagination into reality.
Still I plan; still there is little to show for it.

The world has moved on, but this part of me
Has not: it still believes the strength to
Make things happen is in there, somewhere,
In spite of negligible evidence.

After a decade, a quarter century even,
The same words inspire my heart and mind
In so many directions that my hands
Remain dormant, overwhelmed into inaction
By bewildering possibilities. I try to keep things
Simple, but they grow out of control
In my all too fertile mind.

Perhaps this is always how I have
Failed at life: through always trying
Either too hard, or not hard enough;
Oscillating endlessly between anode and cathode,
Never coming to rest between the
Balanced forces of both.

Perhaps one day my focus will shift
From a long past version of the future
To the present in which I actually live.

05/04/2017

Posted on 05/14/2017
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