Fumbling In Half Steps

In the avenues of thought you stirred up ripples And waves, and raised all the dust that had settled On everything that sat within the circumference Of a space between two meanings A tale of two cities And stared down the twin barrel of ill fate While the large jawed kings of your time And the plain faced queens of circumstance Searched for deeper meaning in their alleged souls Upon a time, standing upon a place of memories Which time had mugged and murdered And killed half the things you had treasured Questions led to answers And the answers to more questions If it was a match you would have known You were no match So you threw in the towel and quit trying And mumbled an unrepeatable obscenity And offered your toil tortured middle finger And cussed out an irrevocable infinity A man with two legs and a crutch, clasping A pair of blistered hands, clutching A collection of mirrors containing the images Of a man who fit that exact description Whose eyes stared into far spaces A man crippled and crumbling Whose feet stomped in lanky paces Upon a path at half past forgotten And all the large jawed kings of time And all the plain faced queens of circumstance In the wake of all the drama that began to unfold You caught yourself fumbling in half steps Afraid and cold, feeling suddenly old To the rhythm of a heart that beat in half measures And the sign said - Closed because of weather From which you derived no pleasure In the shadow of memory, upon a time of plenty You lingered upon feasts once partaken Where the sun had shone bright on many In a sea of plenty you had nothing, life dilapidated It was there, you would have sworn to it It was there, this fact, as you had known it Handled by those hands, of own eyes obligated Incandescence shines through this dullness Lights up the passages of time and allows us To pass through and to pass up opportunities To lose our ways in the vast perpetuity Where silence raged with the raw tonnage Of a boundless herd of oceanic waves And speech and noise went unheard and unheeded The matters which mattered were sealed and hidden Clusters of mutterings staggered and settled And in settling, died and gathered dust Much as they do now. Much as they did now In the end we clung to the branches of abstracts Something hidden to the eyes but open to the mind Let the reader understand, the rock on which I stand