A Fatal Proposition

There are only photos left now, of what was And what is no longer, Except perhaps for a plat of land, That marks the telltale spot, only for me. But I was busy putting roots down there, In years that seemed more bare, distant, More long lasting, than any years I’ve seen since. A man's heart may know things That it really can't understand, And a man's mind can wish for things Which can never make any sense; And somewhere in between The knowing and the wishing, Lies a fleeting kind of sanity. Some lives I lived might have killed others, And some days I've known, broken other's spirits. The world appears a fine and satisfactory place, Until it starts going away by degrees; A face, or sometimes just a room, at a time. But time is the abyss Where eventually all of us begin to lose parts Of the identity, of ourselves. Sometimes, only your thoughts Can return to what you used to know, by heart. What a chalice of certainty appears the child By contrast, to that collector of old shadows, the man. If we could return only once, All the things to the way they used to be, We would perhaps reverse it all, And thereby vanish, ourselves. But the more haunting idea back of everything, Is that perhaps it never really had a separate existence, Outside of the mind's manipulations. I fear how it all lives on only inside of us now, And if that is all that it has ever actually been, And how life seems at best a fatal proposition, after all.