mmmmmlxxix

If You Had Asked for My 15-Year Plan
25 Years Ago...

It wasn’t going to be this.
I should write an autobiography,
and entitle it Losing My Education.
Or, How to Complain More as the
Life You Worked Like Mad to Achieve
Is Frittered Away.  But, me?  I can’t
become the very templates of the folks
(particularly men), mostly academics, older,
complaining about how they had been
ripped off from gaining whatever
achievements they’d set their sights
toward however long ago their youth

might have been.  Nor would I have 

any desire to become any of the 

numerous business executives for and
around whom I have worked some
three decades plus, who at every
corner, eyes rolling back into my
head each time one of them is 
turned, there’d be 3-year, 5-year,
10-year, and 20-year plans sliding

hot and dry from the color printer.  

There were only two fixtures that

never failed to show up in these:
dollar signs and a human figure inching 

their way up some career ladder, atop 

which lies the inevitable nest egg for 

a retirement that, with focus

so intent upon said egg,
one likely could never 
begin to enjoy.  Because

there are always more to 

be made, higher offices

in which to lay down
brief stakes.  It sounds
remorsefully tempting for me
to imagine, however, anything
gained with as much regularity
as the losses that I keep accruing.
And that, from me, is more than a 

regretful and foul-tempered complaint.
Therefore, I’ll screw myself back together
and somehow imagine the yet-to-

appear rainbows which will inevitably

surround me.  And the races won
to the end of each, where would

always lie pots of glimmering

gold.  Somehow.  Happiness
being just a state of mind,
easily adjusted, etc.  And so,
I look around at each
adjacent horizon,
connecting them
all together

in my mind’s
eye until they’re
some damned
gorgeous walls
that each begin
to seem top-heavy,
slanting ever angularly,
toward me, with seeming 

intent upon buring me

entirety, and deeply,

beneath each angular

juxtaposition.  And,

sure enough, or can’t 

you see, isn’t this about
the moment when that
crescent of hope begins
to glimmer,
putting the
fix on all of
this morbid
nonsense?
I think
my sliver
may have
been recently
devalued pursuant
to my latest twenty-four-
hour plan, of any

hope at survival.
Nope.  I cannot 

seem to even begin

to get to the sunshine 

from here.