Misstep Paradise
by Odin Roark

Like the ocean’s waves repeating themselves,
mistakes love to revisit their beginnings,
gloat about their undertow power,
and patiently prepare the next towering breaker.

As if squawking gulls lining the landfall weren’t enough,
joining the prattle is the wind’s ever-repeatable,
“I told you so” oratory.

With ebb and tide behind them,
anxious errors reach progress once alive,
now but mazes of mischance,
ghost towns replete with obligatory tumbleweeds
scurrying past longevity’s sentinels of roaches and rodents
forever faithful to new arrivals.

Even as stored images of ethereal struggle
stay ensconced in supernatural satellites,
reality’s citadel of dust-caked walls and web-laced doorways
display shattered daguerreotypes,
torn photographs,
corrupted digital projections,
3D wanderings,
and holographic ghosts
of perfection’s folly,
holding fast to historical hubris,
mastery’s habitual bungling of headway.

At one end of actuality’s ghost town,
a dangling speaker bellows forth its ceaseless maxim:
“Misstep Paradise is all that matters,
as living life void of errors is to exist
without learning the monstrous reason for it all.”

Welcome to your personal shadow zone,
mind’s inner kingdom of fortuity,
where infinity’s turn-around sign of truth,
remains your chance to finally learn…