RE-TIRED

Every step is a turned ankle.

It wouldn’t be this way

if there were yet lovely growing water

singing running clean, cold, clear

in the river bed of knowing;

that now is just another dried up spot

on a warring planet killing the low

evaporating every pure drop

exposing all of the loose rivers bed rocks

that we are all forced to tramp upon.

We should spend our steps making concrete

to sew the loose stones together.

Then there would be no more left to throw at each other.

Still as in everything there is a downside,

if the water ever came back clean, cold, clear

it would have no dear voice left with to sing.

Until that dream of a past becomes a present

pain is justified in both the ankle breaks and sprains

coupled to the intellectual thirst with ignorant thought trains.

Every thought these days is a hurt,

a lost passage that is a little grief upon a little grief

until a great mound is grown.

The only relief left the walker now

is the old pebble in the mouth trick

to slake the thirst to simply know

where it was the knowledge

for living together went to?

I suppose that answer I know and knew,

some tuition charging college only meant

for the very elite few who can afford

the ancient wise wet words found in books.

My own ignorance knowing

 has built up to where I now understand

better than before why it is depression

not footsteps or sadness

laid in trails across times sands.

For knowledge kills the knowing

that was meant to be a candle light

in withered weathered hand a way to show.

I traded my portion of happiness

for desire to  understand

why walking dry river beds

only had two outcomes;

two horns to be gored upon.

Flash floods to wash me away

to life not desired nor wanted anymore

or turned in ankles broken again and again

for no matter how much I uncovered,

in my dry stony wadi bed discovered

I found I was still ignorant and shackled

to this ever warring world made by man.

© M Durfee

5/16/13