On Our Quest For Happiness Poem by Ila Manish

'Just one more time.'
And so the fever starts,
The fever that gnaws at your insides,
The fever that burns out the balance,
The fever that's always seeking more.

Higher and higher we try to reach,
Each step up,
two steps down.
Each strand of gray -
The weight of an added step,
The weight of a lost joy,
The weight of a moment, missed.

Hamsters on a wheel, we keep running,
Running to a Utopia locked in romantic
Chambers of our brain,
Naively, we chase key after key
...tethered
Chained by shackles of freedom,
Freedom abused by us against ourselves.

Slipping into bubbles of 'happily ever afters, '
We poise ourselves upon the ocean of reality,
Each shard of water -
a pinprick on our perfect globe,
pulling us down under.
Gasping for breath, we resurface,
Hound dogs,
preying for our next sparkling delusion.

We burn, bright passionate flames,
Fed with the richest of oils,
But even the brightest of stars die out,
And so we flicker into a querulous content once more.

Running from the fever,
The knowledge -
Weighing us down,
The incessant beats slip into our very souls.

True joy and sorrow mirrored in our ignorant
Childhood alone,
Even then -
mere dimples on the cheek of time,
Never lasting, yet
...forever present,
...forever taunting us on.

The beauty of each sunrise,
The resplendent night sky,
The fleeting moments of joy in quotidian life
Escaping us in our search for happiness
For after all,
Who really knows what happiness is?