The Folly Of Ambition Poem by Piscine Kipling

What does the sky do but drape over us, in deep blue and solemn gray?
And what is our aspirations doing but pull us further into a bitter end?
Why are we chasing those moments we plan to have some other day?
We know our futures will eventually come, but what happens then?

Make no time for now, every moment we have is devoted to the next
Devotion and grand illusions of what's to come guide us forward
The desire for pleasure as the center of our prospective life is worthless
In the mind it is there, in the real world that is an axiom of absurd

We anticipate the grandeur we seek to feel and see for ourselves
And what a contrast it is when the wrongs of life bring us down
But cherished are our dreams and deceived we will by telling the self
That the present is a temporary thing, it's just bad luck for now

The possibilities are endless, yet we already have a clear-cut vision
Of how it will go and how our lives will unfold in front of our eyes
How that will happen, and how this will be, everything else is hidden
Think it away into some far off thing; our fantasy is safe for the night

Into a waking dream we delve into, and it’s still intangible and distant
Every option we make now is just false moves in an unwinnable game
With the assured fallacy that one day above the rest we will have risen
How we will never know that our chance will always slip away, as set by fate

Withering away as we age will be our many goals and expected experiences
A part of crude maturing, to realize reality and abolish our ambitions
How we will trade away plans from the past for deceptions of substance
Filling in that void formed, distracting our real minds with hindrances