.
He’d hear the
Naysayers saying
He was too broken to bloom,
That his struggles
Were too dire,
And that
Nothing could stop a
Young boy from disobeying…
.
He’d hear the
Hypocrites deigning
He was nothing like his Dad,
That the schism between them
Was too great,
And the
Needed discipline
Would cause permanent disdain…
.
But he brushed them off
And pressed
Into his visions,
Where, for decades,
He rode a breaking wave,
In a pocket of focused energy…
Ever wet with a decent happiness,
He bled intense fragility and accomplished
Things he’d never dreamed of…
.
BUT THE WARS CAME…
(Eventually) the bones of every
Unresolved circumstance pushed up
From their shallow graves to beset him…
.
Then life (for him)
Became like a small boat
Rising and falling with the tide;
Awakening, rising, eating, excreting,
Working, eating, sleeping, awakening, rising
In a kind of ritual monotony that often complicated
His energies in unforeseen ways… and
.
Like an Ishmael,
He pressed heaven to
Reveal why his creativity had
Become like soap-bubbles -
Floating ‘n popping -
And why the
Honest originality
He strove for was often
Lost in a haze of starts and stops
.
He recalls
(Now and again)
All the golden thoughts
He’d had that often felt exact,
Until he wrote them down
And read them,
And then he knew
How little he wanted credit for, and
How elusive the original things really were.
.
richard lloyd cederberg
11/17
.
“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.” Horace 65-68 AD

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