Are you embittered by your latest defeat?
Emboldened?
We ask these questions because we sense
the distance is not too great
between your depleted fantasies
and our realized fact.
We feel you fail to see the freedom
of your full horizon before you.
Which is a tragic miscalculation—
a cruel, self-defeating joke.
We see the grand valley before us—
its contours and depth spread
erotically like the latest dream
that maddeningly resists consummation.
Your sights are set lower or reversed.
You stare at an eternal idealized past,
that once, long ago, must have felt as pressing
as the present.