Poem: Beauty

All the beauty singing in the background,
The ubiquitous breastwork of loveliness
Encompassed me, if I would but open my mind,
At least as wide as I could open my eyes.

This periscopic gaze, a gift to me
As a toddler, slowly bleached, as I aged,
Into the gray of the everyday
Unfocused haze, when I perceive only

The drudgery of the trivial.
God’s outstretched hand faded from me,
Back, and smaller, and, as in a rear-view mirror,
Out of sight. Covering my trail of sad

Abandonment; I, a fallen Adam, was tempted
To name my forsakenness Sophistication;
But no, I am a man alone, slung in an agony wild,
As I pub crawl to any fugitive and flitting bliss,

Yearning to see again what I once saw, and
So foolishly ignored, when a child.