John Stetson Poet Free verse

Tone Poem

I remember waxing nostalgic as I was walking home from church on a Sunday morning.  It happened suddenly.
I remember where I was, and what I was looking at, and the weather, and I can still see it in my mind's eye.
I was 16... and I hadn't ever personally experienced anything really sad, or monumental, or anything, really.

I just suddenly realized that nothing would ever be the same, ever.  Nothing ever is, really.  
But it's not something you usually think about among a series of random mundane trivial teenage thoughts.  
And yet, there it was.  And it made me sadly wistful, without really knowing why.  And that made me sad.

But I also thought, this is odd.  At this age?  To think of such things.
Is there a word for being sad in anticipation of the thought of being sad?
I suppose disillusionment comes close...  but not very close.

A personal moment of enlightenment shouldn't come with such darkness.
But personal rules don't extend to the cosmos.  They frequently don't last til midnight.

Disenchantment might be a better fit.  But you have to have an enchanted life to begin with, for that word to apply.
And for a spell to be cast that is beyond one's control, it must be subject to other forces as well.

When I was in my 20's I used to say that I thought I led a charmed existence... until I didn't think that anymore.
A series of personal setbacks made that perspective dissolve into the miasma of reality.  
Not the malodorous kind, but the thought-corrupting atmosphere of stubborn obscurity.  
We can see the horizon...  we just can't see beyond it.

Now, looking back at how many of us born 16 years before that first pang of nostalgia are still around to ruminate, 
let alone are still reasonably intact, I realize that the odds are not so odd.  They're just unfeeling.  
They don't wrestle with uncertainty, insecurity, obscurity, or illusion. 
And they're not proven out til after the fact.  They just are.
Beating them is not, so much, a matter of choice...  but chance.

Wisdom, we like to think, increases with age.  I think it's more likely resignation.  
Not rationalization, but realization.  
Self-awareness and acceptance that free will leads to personal choice.  
Sometimes it seems there aren't any good ones.  But they're all we have.  
And once they're made, like the best laid plans...  
Well, you know the rest.

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