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| Poem |
 
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The Meantime by Joe Dees
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We should greedily grasp and squeeze
The pulsing throat of each new day
As though our last rattling
Breaths were to be drawn within it
And lost before the following dawn
And suck each succeeding hour within it dry
Of every rich drop of juice that it affords us
As if we were all destined
For our pulses to weaken and wane
Slowing towards cessation
In sad and mournful synchrony
With the mortal setting
Of the next concluding sun.
For one day, we know not when
Most surely sooner than we would wish
And maybe before we would expect
This will indeed be the case.
In the final analysis
Being born is an event that will
Prove to be eventually fatal
For each of us
And all.
The enemy of our fully living our lives
Is the cruel and dreaded Meantime
And that sad and tedious detritus
With which we falsely feel
Compelled to occupy its span:
Those myriad and niggling little things
With which we wrongly feel
That we first must deal
Before we can begin upon, or can finish
Those things that we would
Most fervently desire to do instead.
This larcenous illusion steals away
Our precious and irreplaceable moments
Filling them with worthless flotsam
And leaving us with little
Or nothing to show for their passing
Except for an irretrievably
Wasted past within which we are
Forced to record their loss.
Instead we should inhabit
Each unrecoverable day
As if it pulled our closing curtain
And learn to roughly discard
The deceptive demands
That this insidious Meantime
Pretends to impose
By ourselves feasting greedily
Upon our own lives’ cornucopias
Rather than ceding their consumption
To the vicious ravages
Of this rapacious demon by default.
Then, instead of risking
Death’s stealthy arrival
Discovering that we had
Left far too many things undone
We might fulfill our numbered days
With treasured endeavors
Proud accomplishments
And the rewarding
Riches of experience.
In such a manner we should be able
To embrace our certain demises
Secure in the comforting knowledge
That we had truly and
Fully lived.
Easy advice to give:
So very hard to take.
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