Identity Stairwell
by Odin Roark


Infinitely malleable we're not,
but choices are numerous.

Growing up demands…

Living through churning rides,
ups,
downs,
centrifugal forces
one’s once free movement,
eventually becoming hampered,
creating arrhythmic breathing,
as if recovering from a linebacker tackle.

There are childhood options…

Funhouse barrels,
giggles and laughs,
whether at the fair,
or in fantasies of escape.

By adolescence…

Hormones raging,
anything becomes possible,
save trying to ignore laws of science.

Adulthood explodes…

Trapping one in the vortex of ambitious movement,
a maelstrom of ever-increasing speed
pushing one's baggage against
the ever-present internal wall,
where evolving identity,
confuses direction,
as the core of stability
asks one to take hold of tomorrow,
retain control and drop anchor,
allow pause for reattaching one’s essence.

Often…

Time advances too quickly,
inertia's safety seeming to drift away,
rendering untethered one’s mooring.

Still…

While we long for the twisted spin to stop,
there is that incessant fixation of purpose,
urging more earned exhaustion,
pitying not youth's whirl-about,
or adulthood’s chaotic turbulence to prevail,
but the unwillingness to allow knowledge its due.

Wisdom knows…

Until one’s grip accepts time’s rusted barbs,
those eroding, crumbling yesterdays,
and embraces the innate imagination always present,
one’s stairwell of experience may twist into
a degenerative stranglehold of tomorrow.

To pay attention…

Is to live with life's identity stairwell,
resisting not the churning encounters
but respecting one’s preordained disposition,
where obsessive climbing to nowhere
never side-steps the precipitous fall
from decaying rungs,
the ensuing six feet under darkness,
or one’s identity stairwell
finally becoming cellular dust.

But lest we regret…

Trust nature will nurture new beginnings,
as it always has.