Thinking Of My Bucket List Poem by Sibghatullah Khan

Since I'm past the time when it is hard to think
that, somewhere, Death might have laid his snares,
I keep telling myself over and over, as I drink
deep on life, that I might be caught unawares.
Going in the fast lane, I always regret
why I haven't done my overdue yet.
why I can't stop this Merry-Go-Round?
Why I haven't yet my happiness found?
It's my discourse of irrelevance, I trow
that keeps me from doing I must do now.
It does not allow me to check off my list
and dims the significance of what I wished.

In my horrid privacies I scream that I'm to do this,
I'm to do that, and I do not have to miss
that, with its formidable fare, life is a bliss.
Let me hold the reins of Time to read
divinity in the face of my feisty little boy
who is but a fountain of joy, sheer joy!
before I'm told that he has grown old.
Let me pause awhile to hear
'Time's winged chariot hurrying near';
that someone is waiting, someone very dear,
whose face carries the runnels and tunnels
through which Time and I went playing by.
Let me stay awhile to know before I go
that it's not getting and spending; it's all about mending.
Let me get it right, right, at least now,
that I do not have to live in the sweat of my brow;
that I shall not have the same eyes and the same heart;
that Beauty will not wait, and youth shall not last.

Let me not myself beguile
that this giddying Merry-Go-Round I can stop awhile
and do what I think I should do, and say
what I think I must say, before I call it a day.
Like a scheming strumpet, this world keeps you on toes;
you drool over its charms and it hardly throws
your way whatever you desire. Hark dear, hark!
She suddenly grows ugly when it gets really dark.