Knowing that your youth,
Your charisma and your confidence
Will eventually desert you…
And none will stay with you any longer
Than the first sign of your autumn…

And that friends and colleagues
Will also leave and go the way
Their dreams and desires take them.
Your neighbours will move…
Your neighbourhood will change…

And also that at some point
You will no longer be the right person
For the jobs that you have done
Day after day, week after week,
Year after year…

And your child now taller
In every sense…
Capable and young and free
Will someday soon, start seeing you
As her added responsibility…

Why then is this desire
To see yet another tomorrow?
To live yet another day?
What is its want?
Why does it remain obscure and voiceless?

If not for the fulfilment of desire
Why else should life beckon?
What must we learn from sorrow?
In living our lives when do we come to ask:
“For what is this life?”

For it cannot just be to foolishly chase
One more pleasure, or one more goal
When our experience shows us
That we live but in a world of appearances,
And make-believe and temporariness.

What is that ultimate hope
That we all cling to?
What is that permanence
That we feverishly seek?
Of what purpose is our inevitable disappointment?

I have no answers
But I have my restlessness
And an impatience and a disdain
For what we celebrate as meaning and success…
A delusional system of thought celebrating itself.

Time is our conveyor
But to what must we arrive?
Something within me wishes for another chance…
A chance to re-arrive to this moment
Free of an accumulated self.

Perhaps what we’re living for
Is not continuation;
It is the persistence to be free
Of who we’ve come to be
A liberation from the cage of the mind.