To What End

I try so to make good of my life,
to make it clear and neat.
As though a wizard, I wave the wand
of my good intentions over the many disappointments,
hoping to create a fairy-tale ending.

Who can endure the dead-end rambling of one’s own
history without attempting to edit?
Who can embrace the corpses of emaciated dreams and
pick up the debris of a thousand abandoned projects,
still believing something new will spring up?

And who knows how it will be tomorrow?
Our hearts will have their own ways.
Tearing out through unlocked doors
they run naked in the streets.

Things do add up, at least for those who
pause to observe, though not to any determinable sum.
Like chemicals bleeding together
my life runs a series of vignettes,
ever mingling, ever changing one another.

Only in looking back does the story emerge.
Death alone will give me the vision to rewrite it.
But, then, the pen will have been taken away.