DISCOVERY

DISCOVERY

Discovery is illusive, like a phantom in the night,
Invisible ink on an empty page,
Nothing there when held to the light.
Oblivious to the challenge of youth and age,
Hiding somewhere in the shadows out of sight.

How I long to be discovered, like an actress in a smoky room,
Marilyn or some other starlet, long since gone and in the tomb.
But discovery is random, fickle and unkind,
And a run down poet with Parkinson’s
Is surely not what he had in mind.

I just want to know that in some cosmic sense,
There’s a rhyme and reason to this life,
That it’s just not all coincidence.
That at least a single soul finds comfort in my words.
That there’s something magical about only me
That sets me apart from the stampeding herd.

That there’s a meaning in my being here,
That I’m not just stealing space,
I want to be discovered,
By some victory of grace.

I have lived and loved, and written well,
I tell myself that that’s enough.
And it’s plain to see I write for me,
Forget the esoteric stuff.
The stuff of which my dreams are made,
It lies abandoned in the shade,
Gone but not forgotten,
Like a heart’s crumpled shards,
The dreams I had are crumbling,
To the finish line are stumbling,
But my hopes are stubborn and my dreams die hard.

Discovery is illusive, like a school child longs for snow days.
And my best snow days they are gone,
Like a fool I venture out, like an idiot I travel forth,
Work to be done I tell myself, a hunter with his bow,
I skate against august advice, cracking through the ancient ice,
Bargaining with the future, and tempting tomorrow.

And I long to be discovered, like Columbus did America,
Like Ponce de Leon did the Fountain of Youth,
Like da Vinci he found beauty and Michelangelo his truth.
But discovery is a blind man who turns his eyes from me,
And I am lost to the waves that toss and will be for eternity.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED