It’s born, it lives, it dies,
As the next rises from the ashes of its carapace,
Blazes with the heat of life,
And then falls.
One after another
In quick succession,
The assembly line of time rolls on.
By some involuntary instinct,
We pick up the ashy shell of each moment,
Dust it off,
And place it neatly next to the last
On a shelf in our mind.
Sometimes this is a crematorium, or morgue,
That smells like lost opportunities
And times gone by;
At times it is a museum,
Where we pin each moment by the wings
In proud display;
At the same time, it is an asylum or a prison,
To which we, as judge and jury,
Sentence these,
The lifeless husks of moments, to life
In prison,
In part, as punishment,
And, in part, so we can watch them
From behind barred windows
And locked doors.
But in no way is it a dusty warehouse,
A labyrinth of long-forgotten ways and shelves
Housing long-forgotten items.
For we are compelled,
By some force within ourselves,
To review and revisit and relive
These moments that have come and gone.
When we lie awake at night,
And try to close our eyes,
They haunt us like the burning ghosts of fireworks
Branded on our eyelids.
And, as these moments flash repeatedly before our eyes,
Blinding us,
We reach out, and with the pain of grasping embers,
We mold them
From nagging, buzzing, regretful gadflies
Into dragonflies, regal and majestic,
And into butterflies with wings of fire,
On which are painted proud eyes
Unmarred by shadows of regret within their depths.
But, even as the shadows of these imagined moments glow,
The husks of husks begin to crumble,
Falling through our grasping hands,
And leaving behind nothing
But the unchanging shell of that hated gadfly.
And again we reach out with insatiable anguish
To mold and shape reality with possibility,
Even though there is a nagging knowledge
That it is too late,
And with the effort of pushing up a hill
A boulder dragging with the weight
Of unwanted memories,
And delicately balancing it at the top,
We, for just a fraction of a second,
Repaint ourselves perfection,
Only to have it come crashing down,
Reminding us of the futility of the exercise
Just as we begin to push again.
Yet, despite the hopelessness
Of our inability to change
The past,
We can draw hope
From our torturous revisions,
For they can become reality,
As, in each instance, a new moment
Is born, and lives, and dies,
Followed by another,
And another.
We pick up the ashy shell of each moment,
Dust it off,
And place it neatly next to the last
On a shelf in our mind.
Sometimes this is a crematorium, or morgue,
That smells like lost opportunities
And times gone by;
At times it is a museum,
Where we pin each moment by the wings
In proud display;
At the same time, it is an asylum or a prison,
To which we, as judge and jury,
Sentence these,
The lifeless husks of moments, to life
In prison,
In part, as punishment,
And, in part, so we can watch them
From behind barred windows
And locked doors.
But in no way is it a dusty warehouse,
A labyrinth of long-forgotten ways and shelves
Housing long-forgotten items.
For we are compelled,
By some force within ourselves,
To review and revisit and relive
These moments that have come and gone.
When we lie awake at night,
And try to close our eyes,
They haunt us like the burning ghosts of fireworks
Branded on our eyelids.
And, as these moments flash repeatedly before our eyes,
Blinding us,
We reach out, and with the pain of grasping embers,
We mold them
From nagging, buzzing, regretful gadflies
Into dragonflies, regal and majestic,
And into butterflies with wings of fire,
On which are painted proud eyes
Unmarred by shadows of regret within their depths.
But, even as the shadows of these imagined moments glow,
The husks of husks begin to crumble,
Falling through our grasping hands,
And leaving behind nothing
But the unchanging shell of that hated gadfly.
And again we reach out with insatiable anguish
To mold and shape reality with possibility,
Even though there is a nagging knowledge
That it is too late,
And with the effort of pushing up a hill
A boulder dragging with the weight
Of unwanted memories,
And delicately balancing it at the top,
We, for just a fraction of a second,
Repaint ourselves perfection,
Only to have it come crashing down,
Reminding us of the futility of the exercise
Just as we begin to push again.
Yet, despite the hopelessness
Of our inability to change
The past,
We can draw hope
From our torturous revisions,
For they can become reality,
As, in each instance, a new moment
Is born, and lives, and dies,
Followed by another,
And another.
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