All My Years Taught Me Nothing, So I Give Them to You

“what is not sought after is never found,”

or so my father would often say,

his life written in the pages of a story

the author got tired of writing

years and years before i could comprehend

what it meant to him,

or what it meant to me

i ‘grew up’ to become like

those ‘adults’ without hopes nor dreams

interworkings of a society filled with machines

the ones which the radical youth

would laugh at; calling us ‘dated’ and ‘conservative’

when they clearly forget we are the classic

we are the tried and tested

and though i laugh in the face

of their unabashed tomfoolery

part of me wishes that

i could understand their secret

they were bold where no one else could be

they discovered evidence of worlds

far beyond our mind’s reach

and though we watched them

tear themselves apart limb for limb

for ideas which seemed questionable, at first

it is when that fire licks their eyes

burning with a determination as if

this would decide if they lived or died

to see the day that it would come to life

or crumble with the sands of time

like the men who died for the sake of others’ lives

like the children who cried for help that never arrived

like the women who lie in wait for a time

they will no longer live that same painful, painful rhyme

and that was when it hit me

a ton of bricks on my back

but a weight off my chest

what had caused them to walk

farther than we ran?

despite all of their failures

how did their work stand?

in the face of the unknown

where had their journey began?

it was so simple

that it was stupid to have forgotten it

they’d learned

and from what they’d learned

came the power to create change

which rippled through the water

of the stagnant pond our world sat upon

and that very stone they leaned on

was the core of their people

idealistic in nature

keen and full of rigor

perhaps we have waited long enough

it is a new day; a new time; a new life

that we now live in

natural selection dictated

we must have the skill set

to survive the harshness of our environment

and so we adapt and to adapt

we must learn

to speak out for what is wrong

to help those who cannot ‘belong’

to tell the world of this hopeful, but simple song

no longer are we the teachers of yellowed thought

but curious children, reborn into an age

surviving on the morals, ideals, and sheer genius

that boils within our very beings

and that, my old friend, is what i meant

when i had told you that day

in the fields of our time, in the place

where my hopes had ‘died’

‘all these years have taught me nothing

and yet now, when i’ve grasped a semblance,

the pieces of it all coming together,

does it fall out of reach’

so i hope that someday

you will find this again

perhaps between piles and piles of unused pens

and relive my life all over

from beginning until the end

to which i trust you to write

a new story for me

a new lesson

which i could have learned by then