Salvage

A strand of thought I followed
A strand I lost as my hands moved
To think those lovely thoughts
To lose them before I had them wrote

The roads that I've traveled
The seas that I've sailed
The skies that I've traversed
Deep inside my waking dreams
A wasteland with no signs
Of the beauty I've witnessed
When posterity calls
I'm left
With this disconnect-filled frustration

To deny won't do
When my mind calls forth those images
Of beauty, serenity, harmony
But then words fail
My canvas turns to ashes
With a pen in my grip
But it runs dry and I'm left
With these black lines that I've scrawled

Wish I could find something to salvage
From the mess of these crossed-out lines
Populating these once blank white pages
These now meaningless loops of black ink
Trying to hard to imitate
The beauty they once could have been

When will these words come of age?
Become something more than just black lines