Three Dreamers

The edge of an emotion's blade
Twists silently behind a smile,
As pallid duties come to fade
And reverie returns the while.
The inner eye looks back, to feed
On memories, through mists of green,
Through jealous pangs of aching need
For If and What and Might-Have-Been.

The tug of unappeased regret
Good times remembered in 3-D,
When all that had not happened yet
Spat on the past's redundancy,
For those we'll never see again
And those we wish we'd never seen,
Mysteriously must remain
With If and What and Might-Have-Been.

If and What and Might-Have-Been
Went drinking on a wasted night,
To watch, high on a plasma screen,
A universe of dying light
And every star shone with remorse
For things not done a different way,
For lives that opened the wrong doors,
For precious chances thrown away.

Relentless mockeries of days
Repentless cruelties of fate
Etched deep in the three dreamers' gaze
With all solutions found too late
And every coil of DNA
Unravelling, un-mourned, unseen;
All structure came to melt away
For If and What and Might-Have-Been.

For everyone who would be free
And anyone who ever pined
If life has but one certainty,
It is that time has no rewind.
For each new plan without a flaw
Another blows to smithereens,
The past is not there any more;
Save for the ghosts of Might-Have-Beens.

© Sara L. Russell, 31/8/05, 21:07pm
illustration by Sara Russell, Sept 23rd 2005.

NOTES:
The If is the masked man with the question mark on
his mask, the What is the tentacled being, the Might Have Been is the baby.