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 fuel on a one way track.
The last ride is an express train,
not bound for glory,
no more stations,
end of story.
If the amount of time I ‘put in’ were commensurate with actual finished product, I would have amassed a substantial body of work by now, several groaning shelves worth, if not of a Jamesian or Dostoevskian amplitude, then at least in the Flaubertian range. Although, admittedly, most of the time that was supposed to be spent immersed in disciplined endeavor has been lost in a haze of abstraction. All these thoughts and memories – all these notes – will perish with me, and maybe that’s for the best. Why save them from inevitable oblivion? If only to bespeak the gulf between what one imagines one is capable of and what one actually is capable of, and the folly of continuing to work on something when one knows in advance that it is a failure. Who am I kidding? The only person I’m kidding is myself. Nobody else is invested enough to be in on the joke.
At this point it would be impossible
to make up for all the lost time.
I might as well try to settle
for a serviceable desperation,
and strive, at least, for resignation:
the long hard process of resigning myself
to the choices I made
by not making a choice.
John Tottenham 