The Past Isn't Through With You, Youth

by Michael McInerney

You’re on the run
But ghosts can fly
Casting bait on hooks
Missing pieces that
Fill the empty spaces
Just don’t look back,
Don’t fall into that trap.
The past isn’t through
with you, youth, it’s only
Waiting until you tire,
Until your quadriceps quiver
Until it gets too hard
Until the doubt dissolves your shell
Until you remember when
When you realize what you left,
Behind is where you’ll go -
Behind, where the corpses rot
Behind, in what was once home
Behind, in a simulation of life
Drowning in nostalgia
Tracing your footsteps
Writing letters to specters
For questions unanswered
Building towers out of time
Thrown out on the wayside
Searching for the potential
Where did it all go?
You dropped it back then
A long, long time ago,
In a place so familiar,
At a time when you ran to
Escape the existential
Exorcism through Endorphins
The purity of the burning pain,
And just a moment of freedom
From fear, from failure
From a cannibal’s desires
From the sawblades of certainty
So free, but so careless
With no mind for that
which you cherished
Loose pockets in the wind
Dropping your things
Spilling your guts
Breaking your legs
Giving up again and then,
Tracing your steps.