Failed Visionary
You lose your face, your health, your mind,
and what do you find?
Wisdom…
that it is too late to use.
You don’t have time anymore,
time has you. It speeds up
as you slow down,
and all the wasted years come rushing back
as you run out of time on a one way track.
The last ride is an express train,
not bound for glory,
no more stations,
end of story.
One might think by now
that the complete lack of payback
would have discouraged me.
But it hasn’t.
A jaded urgency
is my obsolete currency.
While doing nothing, I bask
in the glory of creation.
And lost to myself,
I find myself again,
setting up a screen
upon which reality scratches
in vain. To stem the tide
of pettiness, of complaint
so ingrained.
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… Put it out there and watch nothing happen.
I could have been
ahead of my time;
I could have been
me.
Nevertheless, I proceed,
directionlessly,
hoping to profit
from useless hard-won knowledge,
and brooding about mortality –
about how depressing it is
that nobody knows my name,
and how inconvenient
that one has to die
in order to receive posthumous acclaim.
And worse still, that one
has to have accomplished something.
I must put that on my to-do list.
But what are you going to do
when the life you passively awaited
has slowly passed you by?
You can’t hate something
because you made it unattainable,
and you can’t resent other people
because you let yourself down.
But you can try.
I seemed to have always been the same age.
Then I looked in the mirror and saw a tired
and devious old man gazing warily back at me.
An old man, alone in a room, masturbating over a memory,
fantasizing about women who have forgotten about me,
and brooding over deliberately missed opportunities.
A shadow of my former shadow
slowly becoming invisible, turning gray.
Unfortunately, nobody noticed
that I never went away.
I waited a long time
to become a failure.
It took longer than I expected.
Was it worth the wait?
Frankly, no.
It was all in the anticipation.
But it was nice to have something
to look forward to.
From now on I’m going to be a shadow
of my former shadow:
Living in the present, negligibly,
and regretting the past, sweepingly.
As for the future, I’m not sure if I have one.
But I’ve been saying that for a long time,
and I’m still here, even if I am
ten years behind my time.
Make that fifteen.
I can feel time passing me by,
speeding up as I slow down,
creating the kind of deceptive, reflexive glory
that happens when the speed of the past
overtakes the slowed down present.
I was riding into the promise
of a life without limits,
infinitely rich with possibilities,
when the future suddenly turned into the past.
And looking back upon it,
it wasn’t hugely satisfying.
There no longer seems to be any point
in pointing out the pointlessness.
It hardly seems worth lamenting anymore.
After all this talk of giving up, just do it.
Don’t worry. Nobody will even notice.
