More Pretense Than Passion Poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar

When we each came to be sixteen,
Planting expectations with claims to fulfill hopes...
On hills with slopes overlooking streams.
Nothing in the World appeared mean back then.
Or did folks with bad thoughts
With worse on their minds,
Complain or whine,
Backstab then wine and dine their neighbors
Family and friends.
Again, back then.

By our mid-teens the life that held dreams,
We lived to create
Those scenes to forever lay within them insatiated!
Believing lives with no fear of apologizing would ever end.
But they did. And they do...
To leave us more apologetic for our deeds,
Or the lack to inspire them.
To discover us now pleading for signs of sanity.
Or something that resembles it.

Some of us were nurtured with thoughts
We would always be beloved, belonged
And provided lives gift boxed!
There is no joy when the connections to reality
Begin to snap in place.
We are no longer where we were...
Or in times when then we thought,
We knew what and who!

When we became sixteen...
Too much rebuttal spewed
Unrelenting to forgive,
Forget and mend!
Brewing still we are
For decisions that are made on a whim...
None of us can say
Changes brought our choices to satisfied the men,
And the women to find contentment in these times,
We are living now!

And no heart becomes spared,
For cares that surface on matured emotions.
They show quicker when aging begins to speed.
At sixteen no one is looking to sing a 'blues' duet...
Or think of aging as a death sentence.

Yet,
It is!

As we try to cling onto a bittersweet existence,
With the persistence of a spoiled child.
We eventually leave sixteen to welcome and adopt,
Comfortable habits we can not dropp but defend.
Venturing to speak of new paths to take.
But bluffing as if time had not revealed...
We are still more pretense than passion.