Shambles

 

I look around this place full of memories

Of unplanned dreams that had failed to appear

My luggage stares at me forlornly

Beckoning me to go

Over great fields and plains and green

Mountains and valleys and hills and roads

Across frontiers and outposts back home

Some other place and time I knew before and will again

With grandiose schemes, I harvest and pack

And stuff into bare corners of my belongings

All the desires that I am to leave behind

All the hopes and fears that I return to acknowledge

How quickly I race to procrastinate and worry

And fret and frown at this sudden change

All the while knowing that inevitability

That knowing that the time draws near, and shorter

I look upon my ruined home and hopes

This stuff I have gathered and collected

These things that help define me and who I may be

Now turned over and thrown together

And packaged unceremoniously for quick escape

Like travelling sideshow or wandering nomad

It all is collected and gathered and bound

And made to fit the spaces of some rented caravan

That crosses the country and returns to me there

Into my hands and into new homes

That never felt like a home, just somewhere familiar

Back to where I once belonged, and never did

I leave this new horizon I had conquered

This city on cold plain across the land

Back to those things so familiar and strange to me

Another place to rest my feet

Another place to hang my coat

Another place to put things out

Another place to dream again and anew

Again….