Rhythm and Regret
I know the self I ought to be,
a host of choices yet unmade,
a figure framed in fractured glass;
his face turns, shifting with the years.
How do you name a thing undone?
I chase, I halt, I start again,
a pendulum beneath my chest,
its swing both rhythm and regret.
How much of life is spent in chase,
the act of writing poems to stall
the writing of my life instead?
The syllables are soldiers, lined,
but count them twice and they rebel;
a stray beat here, a rhyme misplaced.
Is this creation, or is it waste?
Perhaps the gilded job I keep
devours me with an endless mouth.
The hours pour into its gut,
and it, in turn, feeds paper dreams;
a paycheck for a fleeting calm.
How strange: to labor for a rest
then sleep and wake to labor still.
A cycle spun of leaden wheels,
I tread its course yet claim it mine.
But forgetting is a kind of truth.
The roads untraveled blur, and yet
I walk them nightly in my mind;
the path where I was braver once,
the fork where courage turned to doubt.
Still, I return, again, again,
forgetting as a rite of faith.
To rediscover is to breathe,
the inhale sharper than the exhale.
If all I loved could slip away,
was it the love, or was it me?
Does permanence demand recall,
or is the soul a sieve by birth,
designed to lose what it can’t hold?
When I forget, I will not fear,
for what returns is truly mine.
And when I do not recognize
the self who stands in mirrored time,
perhaps that too is part of grace;
to let the pendulum unwind,
to meet the swing and not the clock.
