Truth’s Anvil

Shortsightedness knows no ally,
its focus blind to willing aid.

Still...

How we enjoy picturing that
which isn't there,
the "what if?"
often prescribed to dreams,
but made real by denials' insistence,
relegating simple innocence to the shadows
where discovery awaits.

Awaits...

How willingly we wet ourselves
beneath the rainbow waterfall,
drenching our being with vicarious beauty,
not ours by ownership,
not anyone's whose reality speaks,
yet for many, a twisted entitlement by default.

So awash with delusion,
it roils upon survival over desire,
drowning with self-imposed defeat,
remaining unknowingly stillborn,
indefinitely staying that which is not.

Our unknown nemesis
creating current beneath the foam and froth
of cosmic archives,
where Nature's ancient warnings,
Man's embryonic shortcoming
enjoins chronic ignorance.

Until…

It doesn't.

The fortunate few of us wake up,
refusing to drown in multicolored wakes of a fool’s paradise,
surfacing from ocean's horizon,
fashioning delusion,
contenting many with make-believe self-sufficient islands
surrounded by imagination’s checks and balances,
not knowing living’s rise and fall of change,
is but Nature's way of emptying used up experience,
which many refer to as missed opportunity.

Some of us through it all
know honesty and time waits
like a hammer in freeze-frame,
poised above the anvil,
knowing its dropping
induces a final shaping
of who we are,
not what we might be.

The real you.

The real me.