Biden Makes A Run For It Poem by jim hogg

So, once again we're in the booth
And all the weight of history
Amounts to next to nothing now.
We organise a past that suits,
To lend our choice some kind of sense.
And all the while the old men rake
Amongst regrets, the slips of tongue,
The failures that blight every life.
Dissatisfied with destiny,
They feel obliged instead to force
Themselves upon the meek and blind,
To steal the future if they can
Or somehow modify the past.
And I'm no different as I watch:
My thoughts are bent on yesterday;
The errors made, the unmade moves...
My mind a crowd of moments gone,
So full of fate yet unfulfilled.

That Tuesday night in Cairngaan Glen:
When all the roads were open wide
But I was trapped inside myself,
And so I turned my focus then
To all the things that I might build:
A different life - with falling walls -
Escape to bondage of my own;
A rising fence built day on day.
With proud and powerful swings I struck
My destiny deep underground
As if to leave behind for good,
Another world, another time
Where I took fright, when face to face,
With everything I craved back then,
And turned my ears against the toll:
"Commit and I will cherish you
Through all the days we live my love",
As endless fears drove endless posts
Along the burn down through the glen,
'Til I was safe, 'til she was gone,
But not from memory, even yet.
So deeply etched her voice, her face,
And almost every particle,
I couldn't misremember her.

The other night in vivid dreams,
Across the burn and rusting fence
I made the pledge I never could
To fearsome beauty and the path
I wasn't brave enough to take
When it was more than just mirage.

But all our learning rusts away.
Old egos muster might-have-beens
In glorious imaginings;
They'll show the doubting masses now;
They'll tramp the young turks down somehow,
And silence all their tuneful songs,
Or simply dream redemption dreams
Of presidential legacy;
While over here I'm looking for
A passageway or phrase that leads
Up through the bushes by the burn
In to that unforgotten world,
Or maybe just another chance...
Though once I would have laughed to think
That someday it might come to this:
This swimming after ships long sailed,
This everlasting selfishness.


12 12 19