Evening Conversations

Old friends you come to reminisce and share The stories of better life, another day compared O I have question to settle matters here Before I pack and go again - something here is seared. Did you too As a child with gawking eyes and gangling dreams Pursue Through silence the rights of adulthood? Did you too Long for the day when we would be the only law And work would only be play? O what giddy headedness! Why were so vain? For here we come to this place Almost the end of what we longed to embrace And here this hollow sense of something missing still Did we do something wrong Or was this there all along Was it irrevocably fixed A gene in their actions, some invisible mix In all the years before their years In the legacy's spiralling stairs The sun is set And we cannot alter it. O children who long to leave The world of innocence ... beware For we too are children Carriers of the Sisyphusean dream The web only glitters ... but mortal is our scream I would have taken all of Jacob's ladder Where only angels climb O but so gullible we are We seek to to catch When wise men follow stars.