Stairwells of Choice
by Odin Roark

Infinitely malleable we're not.

But growing up,
living through churning rides,
ups,
downs,
centrifugal forces our once free movement
eventually becomes hampered,
creating arrhythmic breathing,
like the recovery from a linebacker tackle.

There is our childhood.
Funhouse barrels.
Giggles and laughs,
whether at the fair,
or in our 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 childhood innocence against
the ever-present internal wall,
where evolving identity
confuses direction,
the core of stability.

Inner being asks our willingness to take hold of tomorrow,
retain control,
drop anchor and allow pause to determine the depth of safety…one’s essence.

Often…

Time advances too quickly,
inertia's safety seeming to drift away,
rendering one with a mooring ungrounded.

Still…

While we long for the spinning to stop,
there is that incessant pirouette of purpose,
urging earned exhaustion,
pitying not youth's spin-about,
or adulthood’s chaotic whirlpool to prevail,
but pursuing the rewards of knowledge.

Wisdom knows…

Until our grip accepts time’s rusted barbs,
those eroding crumbling yesterdays
that ask we embrace innocence’s delivery back to childhood,
one’s packaged experience may never resolve.

To pay attention…

Is to glean life's churned experience
beyond Escher’s Relativity,
to overcome an obsessive climbing to nowhere
and seek a different end,
one avoiding a carefully preserved,
Sealed dark closure,
Lowered,
To six feet below,
where sadly,
there is no second chance celebration.