Our Carousel Within

The child within us runs toward the burning house
while everyone else steps back.
It carries a wooden sword against impossible odds,
a cape stitched from thunderstorms and daylight.
It sees kingdoms in vacant lots,
rockets in cardboard boxes,
whole galaxies reflected in a puddle.

Before the world names its limits,
the child believes every horizon is a door.

For that child, life is a carousel of painted horses,
each revolution a voyage into undiscovered lands.

The music spins castles from air,
every brass pole a beanstalk into the clouds,
every rise and fall a dragon conquered,
a sea crossed, a kingdom won.
The circle is not confinement but possibility,
a wheel of wonder turning beneath stars
that seem close enough to touch.

Then the machinery begins.

Wonder is packed into storage bins,
stacked beneath deadlines and polite obedience.
The mind becomes a mural painted over in gray,
a wild river forced through concrete pipes.
Teachers, employers, expectations, fear,
all take their turn at the wheel,
teaching the child to whisper
where it once sang.

The carousel remains, but its meaning changes.
The painted horses become office chairs and time clocks,
mortgages and meetings moving in circles.
Adults mistake motion for arrival,
mistake repetition for purpose,
riding the same orbit until they no longer remember
they once reached for the brass ring.

Sometimes repression becomes something darker.

The child is treated like a mine to be emptied,
its trust stripped for profit, power, approval.
Its innocence becomes stolen currency,
passed hand to hand through generations.
Such theft is no small wound.

It is a crime against possibility,
the breaking of stained-glass dreams
to sweep the colors from the floor.
The carousel becomes an engine of consumption,
turning endlessly beneath carnival lights.

Some climb aboard only to exploit the music,
to harvest wonder while giving nothing back,
leaving the horses hollow-eyed and worn,
their once-bright paint cracked by greed.

Yet the child never dies.

It waits like an ember beneath winter ash,
like a lighthouse hidden inside the fog.
What fades is only our willingness to let it be seen,
and the temptation of others to extinguish what still shines.

Still…

The carousel turns somewhere within us,
beyond cynicism, beyond the rust of years.
Its calliope waits beneath the noise of adulthood,
its horses poised between memory and hope.
And when we listen closely,
we discover the child never truly left the ride.

It has been circling there all along,
patient and undefeated,
waiting for one honest glance,
one open door,
one hand reaching again for the brass ring,
one chance to step back into the light.