Forever Poem by Vic KirkTurner

'Friends forever'
written on a high school journal.
A realisation of
the yoke 'forever' forever brings?

Now forever has come and gone,
friends too, are all but staggered silhouettes
on the bleak background of passing years,
and forever, streaches on still
in billowing dust and slow sand routes.

Your conception of 'forever'
was a lie that languidly lay
in the honey-thick pull
of innocent innocous and idle youth.
Have you been rudely suprised
by your own mortality?
Does forever now seem too long to bear?
Do you wait, and curse, and steam and
despair and longingly, languish in the
deep green thoughts that forever
may not be the bitter taste that lingers
in your mouth at the thought of life ahead?

Or have you, like I, been swept up in the
inevitable invincibility of the forever of foreverness?
A single grain of sand, left to rot in the rays
of salacious sadness, till hard-worn time
treads and tramples you into dust under-foot.

2006, Johannesburg, South Africa