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Twenty-Six

Twenty-six came fast... Possibilities
close in by the hundreds, as if they were marching
to the sound of a choke-hold.
Pressure's a good thing
when it has us make something
beautiful, or something hot.
Stardom, creation, art, 
invention, love, whatever...

Those are something.

But twenty-six years
don't guarantee illumination-
that a step forward won't be going back 
where the space is too expansive for comfort.

Why does the emptiness scream so loud?

Maybe I'll run off to Boston
or Brooklyn, or somewhere in Florida
where the noise is real,
where the sun can make me forget.
I hear Santa Fe's nice and full of hippies like me.
But there they are again-
options.

Was I tricked?

Twenty-six... and mother society
(that *****) 
says I should stop screwing around.
Try stability like other healthy-functioners.

But they look bored.
I'll be damned before I'm one of them.

See, I'm a should-must-hater to the core.
But I get it...
I can only say 'screw that' so many times,
til I've screwed just about every should in the book,
an obligatory ****.
And I know that somewhere in time, 
poignant obligations could become wanted.

Transformation happens to us all-
no tricks.

But twenty-six still haunts...
narrowing halls, nightmares, bad dreams...
wedding bells and crying babies
and sweat-soaked sheets.

Enough! I need a drink,
drink too much, back to square one...

But before you guess,
or relate in ways
that make your world seem smaller
and less heavy-
Before you judge me 
too far gone, or too unsafe for pleasure,
Let's at least acknowledge together
That I have one thing (make me feel better)

Time the wish-granter is still big
at twenty-six.
It's the lesson-learner, the justification
of risk, and the stupidity of youth.

(And if time's not linear as once they said,
I wonder will I always BE somewhere?
Lost in some traveling wavelength?)
Time is a mind-boggler too.

I'm twenty-six... but at fifty-two
I may not have all the answers I want.
But I can relax about that,
that's what time can do.

Twenty-six..  
all that's left for me now

is a thousand different ways
to enjoy the movement,
to take a moment and watch it spin
into constant re-arranging moods 
through the interaction...
Like a falling deck of cards echoed
into an oblivion 
of my very own.

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