A Wordsmith’s Odyssey
by Odin Roark

There will come a time…

When hours and days of growing-up seasons
will gaze upon fogged windows
and remember playful finger-expressions.
When baseballs told those same small fingers
that life curved beyond fun.
When tree huts were home
and fireflies mixed with stars,
while skater-sects skinny dipped
across bottomless fishing holes.

For some of us…

Life’s aperture reflects between youthful eyes and adult tamed hope,
mirroring today as now,
holding in suspension a flurry of yesterdays
passing beyond a commuter-train’s windows.

And still…

Like the you of long ago,
across the aisle another child draws his world dreams
upon a glass-canvas of steamed invitation,
seeing not beyond, but appeased with youthful imagination,
unabated.

You smile.

You remember.

Turning back to your window,
adorned by more blurry reflection than canvas,
bygone echoes whisper quiet memories.

All because…

Bullet trains became technological antiquity,
with rail-less levitation aging as well.

We recall…

Only yesterday, field’s soil-rich ground nurtured stalks of corn
patiently reaching to the sky.
But today are invested with launch pad after launch pad,
spewing titanic clouds of fire and dust as space is explored,
and our species may be disappearing.

Some might say…

Living is just another “all aboard” from
our futuristic Grand Central’s astral playground.

Upward, outward, inward,
we build our personal launch pads,
devouring yesterday's sparkles in the dark,
like birthday cakes of yore,
their inextinguishable candles of tomorrow forever lit,
honoring fading images of yesterday's innocence.

City-sized-glassed sky domes,
like metaphysical intuition,
beg us gaze upon this
seamless futuristic wonder,
where dreams are but milestones for
yesterday’s anticipation,
today's reality-chosen bids,
and tomorrow's cave drawings of history.

Such are life's rhythms,
tempos,
commas,
ellipses,
and periods,
(question marks for cadence surprise).

Where upon the page,
and only upon the page,
sheets of groundings,
these vapor-etched finger-brushes of our youth,
the ever evolving growth of perception,
becomes but our own stories,
needing only to be shared.

Aggressively…

Our pens ever filled
by ink's fearless trust,
we see blank pages now facing us
as but momentary tunnels to pass through,
a seemingly granite-hard mountainside of fear
about to be rendered scree
by Need's tenaciously born trust.

We suspend our breath
to tunnel's end,
find light for breathing,
even as suffocation threatens our
routes less traveled.

The power of refractive disturbance
remains but a blurred wave outside.
Our mind's focus,
heart's duty,
and life’s insistence,
forever sustain
our child-protected imagination,
our refusal to completely grow up.

If only more could see it so.