Process of Illumination

A Poem

Photo by Thaís Silva from Pexels

for the sake of second-guessing ways

we mull over each moment

of pride or peril

and we’re lost in seams

brought together by right and wrong —

all those mistakes we made

along the bitter way

and sought to find absolution

in ways we could then stomach

we wanted answers so fast

but they weren’t ours

to claim at any junction —

though we tried, oh, we tried —

till our knuckles bled freely

in the backwater pond

that witnessed ends and beginnings,

too many to count now,

and we fell away

into a brand of complacency

that only our parents had known

we bore a learning curve —

all those wasted things,

too much to regret,

a litany of broken symphonies —

and we also lied to ourselves

that we were the solution

to life’s every question

but we were wrong

because we just kept spinning

the same old cycle again, again,

the hamster wheel of life —

our mortality in doses,

our lives trickled in hourglasses,

the old stories in new covers