schadenfreude
02-05-2008, 05:09 AM
Only looking towards the next meal,
back aching from laying supine
for hours at a time
I spend my holidays reading old diaries- frail tea pages sprawled
with a childish scrawl.
It is now the future and
I am still in the past. I didn’t even catch a glimpse of time
zooming past on a red Audi, leaving nothing but dust and
sepia tones. My friends have all ‘moved on’, as they say,
to the greater dream- a job, house, a family, a car. But I,
I could never have followed, so I sit here recounting and
recollecting old passages.
There was a time when I made my fiery demands.
Standing in the warm lounge of the university café, I
cried out simple slogans for world peace, social justice, an end to poverty,
and berated Bush for the war. Too busy to write for myself,
I wrote for Amnesty International, calling for emancipation and equity.
I scorned the traditional conservatives, scoffed at religious fundamentalists
and cursed the feeble-minded for their apathy.
I was younger, you see. I knew the secrets of immortality.
But that has all gone now, and I trawl through coffee-stained pages:
palimpsests of darkened rings washing aside nothing in particular,
wishing that I had been selfish enough to write for myself.
And now,
I watch the young women pushing prams
down the street,
across from where my house stands,
and the crackling of rubber wheels on the hot gravel
leaves a trail through my head.
back aching from laying supine
for hours at a time
I spend my holidays reading old diaries- frail tea pages sprawled
with a childish scrawl.
It is now the future and
I am still in the past. I didn’t even catch a glimpse of time
zooming past on a red Audi, leaving nothing but dust and
sepia tones. My friends have all ‘moved on’, as they say,
to the greater dream- a job, house, a family, a car. But I,
I could never have followed, so I sit here recounting and
recollecting old passages.
There was a time when I made my fiery demands.
Standing in the warm lounge of the university café, I
cried out simple slogans for world peace, social justice, an end to poverty,
and berated Bush for the war. Too busy to write for myself,
I wrote for Amnesty International, calling for emancipation and equity.
I scorned the traditional conservatives, scoffed at religious fundamentalists
and cursed the feeble-minded for their apathy.
I was younger, you see. I knew the secrets of immortality.
But that has all gone now, and I trawl through coffee-stained pages:
palimpsests of darkened rings washing aside nothing in particular,
wishing that I had been selfish enough to write for myself.
And now,
I watch the young women pushing prams
down the street,
across from where my house stands,
and the crackling of rubber wheels on the hot gravel
leaves a trail through my head.