Sketched Out in Brief

We have been ravenous
and we have taken our
fill when we could,

We, the children grown
in solitude and given no
rule of others to look
upon, building our own
dark arts upon the site
of our creation, creating
value in what dreams
we’ve been able to
dream in the dark,
silent moments of
the night, lying awake
and chill in the shelters,
listening to the sounds
of other, hidden bodies
moving beyond the
limit of our down-turned
lamps.

We, the rough young folk
grown big and angry as
mistreated hounds, barking
into morning for the sheer
company of it, howling
out the unnamed pain
of having been born and
bred to this, but our fists
crack open and give us
hands again if we find
some heavy medicine,
some antidote to the
futility of all these days
of trying to be idle in
the eye of this hurricane
force of industry.

We, the boys now grown
to uncomfortable heights
and ages beyond our initial
consideration, trying to bridge
the gaps between what we
wished and what we were,
between dreams and the
cold cycles of getting up
mornings, going to sleep
late into nights ill-spent,
balancing wishes we can
only see when we squint
hard at them now with
the exigencies of money
and health insurance for
our stained teeth and
questionable knees.

We, who have become part
of our fathers, though lesser
somehow, more diffuse, without
the nobility of labor hanging
sharp and heavy about us like
the sound of hammers falling
and the retreat of a steam train
into foggy distances, and we
know that more time has now
been spent than remains to us,
that we have failed at most things,
but a few chances for success still
remain, desperately clung to
like rafts to the castaway masses
as the searchlights fade.

We, who find ourselves now
aged and useless, deprived of
the fortitude of our youth and
all its conceits, live upon the
unfulfilling meal of daytime
television and repeated phrases
from the final good days, now
years passed, when the world
made any sense to our eyes, when
we knew the names and the faces
of those in the seats upon the
hill, and preserved some measure
of hope that we could be good,
and if not more than our forebears,
at least almost as much, almost
as brave, almost as well-lived
when the ending came.

We, the fading legions unheralded,
dying slow with the day, but
open-eyed as the slow churning
hours of morning pass by,

We have been ravenous
and we have taken our
fill when we could.