American Dream? Poem by Vincent Wong

I can scarcely remember those days that I believed,
That I could be anything, with hard work, and dreams.
A time when I was gullible and so conceived,
That I wasn’t bound to reality and its mundane scenes.

So I dreamt my dreams of countless adventure,
while I still had innocence from adolescence.
Then I realized that they all ended in never,
When I came to age and grew in conscience.

And now I wonder in this repetition,
enticed by the rewards of a material dream.
To listen to the sways and lures of jaded expectations,
And continue to pursue the image of greed’s themes.

These are the ages of limitation,
destined to forget the values of back then.
I’m tied to a circle along with my generation,
unable to remember the endless melancholy of what it had been.