Cycle Of A Loser Poem by David Nelson Bradsher

I courted melancholy in a Gordon Lightfoot song,
the softly-aching folly of a yearning to belong,
but that recording cost me and my drained convictions show
how that remembrance lost me to the claws of undertow.

My spindly engine, straining, couldn't match the muscled tide
that pulled me, swiftly waning, to the place my reason died—
an island, long-deserted, strafed with echoes in the breeze,
of verses, simply worded, by a poet on his knees.

I vomited emotion in a heave of streaming cries
to skim the swirling ocean where the churning billows rise—
the waves, propelling shoreward, rose and crashed upon my feet
to stop the movement forward, and receded to repeat,

but nothing passed those breakers that arose to snare my plea,
propelled across the acres of a never-ending sea.
Unheard, I cursed the swarming of the oceanic rush,
a siren, non-conforming, like the logic of my crush:

impossible to capture, but unable not to chase,
a mad pursuit of rapture, or a shifty state-of-grace,
a foe to race forever with a single-minded greed,
but fading love is clever, and the breathlessness of need

deceives the gasping loser with delusions of success,
with stories to amuse her, implemented to impress—
but no impression breaches all the waves I have to face
while pacing on the beaches of my typical disgrace.