If I Live, What Do I Leave? Poem by Alan Kabanshi

In a brisk draft life rolls like wheels on tracks
In the silhouetted shadows carried through florescent specks
I crumble down and fall right through life’s cracks
On the far broken promises simply made

Ignored I pull through the sickening fragments of a strand
Ominously I heat up like hot desert sand
With endeavors to keep arrest of understanding
And keep abreast with human standing

It’s then too late to realize, we are racers after happiness
Whose race tracks we tread in abundance of wrongness
Yet its creed in self discovery saves our breed
In truthful examinations of ourselves, we are serenade
And like a yard stick desires are comparatively measured
For it’s not how long we live but what we leave
So for memoirs to survive, to what things shall we cleave?

2011