A Maze
After hopeful beginnings, such disappointment.
You accept the strictures of your life
knowing that each day will be terminal,
less enjoyable than a lost cruise ship
stuck atop an immovable mountaintop,
comfortable, spacious, but going nowhere.
The world is inexorable and inevitable.
It’s offerings grow stale before its denouement.
The rush toward death pushes all aside.
A man desperate for meaning, not a meaningful man.
Change is difficult. Difficulty undesirable.
What can be made of the what that remains?
You dabble in philosophy, religion, therapy,
each a dead-end path in a maze of despair.
Too many questions with not enough answers,
hurried as the clock of growing old ticks.
The days tumble, teeter, and fall away.
Thirty, forty, sixty, each a road sign of ending.
You hope to be solid in an insubstantial world,
but permanence belongs only to rocks and fossils.
Love alone proffers the hope of a hope hoping,
hoping to be immortal in the beloved’s memory.
But love also dissipates with each sunrise.
Steady on until the dreaded end arrives,
continuing to desire through fading eyes.
August, 2017
