So many years ago now
my canvas sneakers crashed
into the cold water of puddles in
our wintery East Coast city streets.
The ratty and frayed ends of
my jeans absorbing the
freezing liquid until the
cold damp was almost to my knees.
The notebooks in my bag,
filled with the near incomprehensible
mathematics of young heartbreak
and the earliest sparks of
drafting talent,
and also the stray notation
copied only occasionally in classes,
jostled dangerously; threatening
to fall out into the cold and wet
world of early January near
the Atlantic.
The trees were long bare,
and I wore mostly flannel
and denium and the absurd
certainty that I would be remembered
long after I no longer walked
these city streets or moved from
class to class inside the halls
of my high school.
I fell in love with a girl who
I knew was too good for me
and I drank and smoked in the
thin wood behind my school.
I made promises of eternity
that I only half suspected that
I couldn't keep and I screamed
full throated with the endless
viger and vitality of youth
into the darkened clouds as though
to seed them with ice cold rain
through the sheer power of
my determination.
I was righteous, though often wrong.
I was proud, though of what
I couldn't say.
I was powerful and I was alive.
I was electric.
I was lightning, crashing into
the earth and demanding to be felt
insisting I be known.

These days I'm not even thunder.
I'm a river-smooth stone.
My edges have been pared off,
my exterior polished to shine.
I'm on display in a suburban home,
occasionally noticed, complimented
and just as soon forgotten.
I watch life go by and it seems
faster now than it was.
So glad you could come.
How are the kids?
What was it you did for a living?
Does any of this matter?
We were meant to move the world.
We were meant for more.
I was supposed to be more.
There will always be then
and time may be an illusion
but it feels like we're coming
to the end, regardless.
We're all just moments in a life
and when those moments are
forgotten what's left only
looks like we did
Once.
I used to care so much...
I am a ghost haunting my own bones
and I dream of distant thunder.
I look at the darkening clouds
but do not dare.
Do not scream.
I do not believe I can call the rain.
I struck this earth once
but I can never strike the same
place again.