Free to Believe the Unbelievable

Time has driven the vagabond from me.

The short span of the illusion of freedom I once had is gone now.

We are all prisoners of our beliefs and circumstances.

We own nothing but memories and fantasies.

When we were children, scared of our own shadows we never realized

that the shadows were as real as we were.

The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is a holographic projection

of people who think they control everything.

But there are always contingencies .

Unexpected outcomes to what seemed a sure thing.

We are products of "Happy Accidents" or unhappy choices 

made in uninformed circumstances.

We are slogans and products of the PR men and Wall Street Crooks.

Going here and there hoping for the best but we do not know what the best is.

We look for signposts along the way.

There are people who live in unimaginable places.

People who think that they are the only people that matter.

We are only one group of these people.

Some we do not even consider being people.

We are driven by slogans and illusions of reality.

What we "should" look like.

How wealthy we "should" be.

Pages out of magazines in the Doctor's offices.

We turn the page to find we have been lied to.

It is an upside down world and nothing is as it appears to be.

So, what is real and what is not?

We may never know…

© Wed.Feb.18, 2015

I Knew You When

I knew you when we were young.

We had big dreams and no money. 

We thought our generation

would make the world Utopia.

We thought we knew all the answers.

We didn't even know the right questions.

I wanted to hold all my friends and family close.

I never considered the changes and sacrifices

we would all have to make.

Now only a few of my friends still keep in touch.

To many I'm just a memory … Nostalgia.

To others I no longer exist in their world.

Most of my family are dead now.

Wars and bad choices took many friends.

How were we to know that all those dreams

would drop away like last years leaves?

And our Utopia would never materialize.

We all fell into the trap of trying to survive 

by becoming wage slaves.

And all the time we didn't see how the life 

we thought we had was just illusion and that

short span of freedom and exhilaration would give way

to our "senior" years.

Nothing lasts forever,

but did it have to end so soon?

We look back to yesterday

but now yesterday is thirty years ago.

And all we can say is …

We knew one another when.

© 2015 Feb 2 Philip G. DeLoach