Finitude Infinitum

A memory like Texas thunder
Flashed behind my eye
Where long ago, a camp light
Flickered red on mountain sky

To seem as though but yesterday
Yet seem another life
Is mystery and commonplace
Profound, yet somehow trite

For times of youth seem far and lost
Upon a distant shoal
Still I am young—or so they say
Who cannot read the soul

All silvered, lined, and travel burned
Beneath a thousand suns
And yet for all my lives it seems
I’ve hardly lived this one

The paths I paced, long overgrown
Seem winding on and on
And yet for all my wandering
I’ve only scarce begun

And as the film rolls on and on
The scenes seem prior watched
And all associations seem
To bear a common plot

Familiar meetings, small talk words
Familiar long farewells
Cathedral towers echoing
The same familiar bells

My flesh and bone in slow decay
As time does heedless bend
Yet still my spirit knows no age
And comprehends no end

Are not we scarcely born
Before our dust slips to the breeze?
Are not our timelines running short
Where once they could not cease?

Eternity burns in the rib cage
Fire in the soul
To clear the road my dreams must tread
My eager feet must go

I’ve just begun to breathe the sky
These lungs have hardly grown
Yet heaved far many a broken hope
Than some may ever know

My mind within so altered
Yet the same—the child, the world
Intent to meet both gale & glow
With sails atop unfurled

So many paths lie undisturbed
And many a land unmet
My eyes have yet to drink the sea
For I have hardly lived