Now

So many poems are passing me by
Standing silent and hopeless watching an
Endless parade of ideas which die
As they melt like snowflakes before I can
Gather myself to touch them to taste them
To grasp them grieving I watch and waste them

Four books and all of them filled with the name
Of one who betrayed me for another
How can I endure and live down the shame
Of criminals laughing with each other
About what a stupid old fool I was?

Yet I have to get through this now because
If this is the end of me then their game
Will be made perfect all at the expense
Of my good name lost with myself to blame
Transcendence now my only recompense

I have certainly found who my friends were
And found I had but precious few in fact
My calls for help ignored by him by her
Only the bitter truth remains intact
That which I once was lies in ruins now
My only hope is transcendence somehow

No longer having one for whom to write
I feel no reason to write poetry
Since the brief day of my love turned to night
It no longer matters nor can I see
My star has fallen I have lost the light
I am my own and only company
And yet that love which seemed to burn so bright
Was only a lie and a joke on me

So nothing has changed I am still alone
Just that my aloneness was once unknown
At least to me but now I see no need
For poetry without someone to read
But since my beautiful muse was a lie
Perhaps in my aloneness I should try
To wrestle with reality this way

This might well be the only way to say
What is left here in the burned-out rubble
Of me the pay of life for my trouble
Still I wonder if there is enough left
Of me to glean here in this field bereft
Of hope to harvest among the stubble
Cut by the sharp scythe of reality

I hope to write because I hope to see
Who knows? I might even write better now
Disentangled from the lie somehow
I might more clearly see what is to be
What ultimately will become of me
And of you and of all the rest of us
Behind the worst before the best of us

I made it out alive though I feel dead
Survived the most monstrous madness somehow
I resolve therefore to live in the now
To never look back nor even ahead
I will write new poems for you instead
Of the one who will no longer allow
Herself to love me if ever indeed
She did who at the end refused to read

I will and I must emerge from this night
From then to now with myself and some friends
In now I will trust and now I will write
New poems now because now never ends

+Steven Curtis Lance



Copyright MMV