I’d like to finish round and glossy with some good I’ve done.
Is any excuse good enough in the end for sliding by,
thinking idly you’d find something once when you realized,
ignorant of purpose here, clueless of meaning,
without thinking, how waves serve a purpose
in wearing down mountains to gleaming grains of sand,
dumb about effecting anything of good in this world,
their foamy fingers instinctively caressing their children back,
finding nothing to forgive like my simply grousing,
stroking each child down to rest in darkness,
what I haven’t done,
the oozy weeds twisting about them,
never learning the secret,
sleeping in their ocean mother’s silent womb,
falling short of finding the why,
learning nothing to do with life’s reason but lie.
How to find that purpose? Is it a calling?
Some voice coming to me out of this fog?
After all these years I still don’t know.
I’m sorry to see I didn’t learn everything
I needed to know in kindergarten,
but I learned from those waves that I am surely being ground away,
rolling smaller toward that second childhood,
no day at the beach of plastic pails and sandcastles,
soon rocking on forever in the infinite cradle,
a burial at sea, my remains so unpolished among those weeds.
I don’t want this simply to be
what was supposed to become of me.
Lanning Lee 