3-9-2021
.
It’s this place
I find myself in now,
past the youth markers,
and the resilient greener grass
once buoyant beneath the
cleats of ball chasers…
.
It’s the mountain
I once saw myself being,
dithering now on a distant horizon,
good intentions becoming the name of
a drink in some dingy bar in the Hebrides…
.
It’s all the many quirks I inherited
from too much struggling,
quirks that became
weapons I wield
(at times)
against everything I feel threatened by…
.
The cheerless awareness that sometimes
I am unconcerned with the feelings of others,
the songs of their hearts, their hopes and dreams,
and being loath to embrace their dysfunction
always, for fear of becoming like them…
.
Indifference causing me (at times)
to become so withdrawn
and self-absorbed,
that I can’t taste anything
but stomach, in a grim quest to
find the grail I once fancied in my youth…
.
So living has made me
a praying man
trusting Holy writ,
rational and meditative,
a believer with unflagging faith,
a brooding dreamer seeking
wisdom in nature,
a measured poet
embracing stylization
and structure as a discipline,
and who purges life’s struggles
as easily as breathing.
A book writer
creating characters
who love and respect
one another, and who live
the adventures he’d expected
he would experience before
life turned a treadmill.
A man freed from
all enchantments, but who still
refuses to give up on what he once saw.
A disenchanted optimist, living among
the hoi polloi, and the well-heeled,
still searching for honor
and integrity
in a chesty
egocentric world,
faulting Beatlemania
and all those early examples
of success and happiness for the
pedagogy that gave life (a kind of) hope
that would prove bootless in the long-run…
.
STILL…. I haven’t given up yet, NO, and
there’s still living hope for a better tomorrow…
.
richard lloyd cederberg
3/2021


                  Between the Cracks - A Monumental Journey Series