Three Men And A Shadow

From here I can see
he’s obviously still
the kid I used to hate
with his false arrogance
and secret shame,
always lying about something
he’d done or not done,
always thinking of girls,
of pills stolen from the medicine drawer,
broken open, poured into
a glass full of water and choked down
as he sweated grades,
expectations,
failure.  To think of him now, groggy
and ashamed to find himself
waking up the in morning
is to feel no pity
and to have all the regret
heaving inside again…

and it only takes a small turn away from him
to see the young husband I used to scorn,
shuffling off ill-dressed to jobs
he thought beneath him, finding ways
to smile at people he thought neglected
his genius, avoiding the evidence
of his own lazy magical thought
about everything always working out
somehow, watching him insomniac pacing
long nights of neglect and loneliness
as if he was alone in this
as the house piled higher with things,
things, things…

Face on, now,
with the fat old man,
gray and bloated, reeking of smoke
and disappointment, imagining
that what has worked in the past
will work again (even though
it never worked at all),
suspecting that the finding of a late love
is perhaps not enough to save him,
pretending
all his choices were the right ones
because that’s what he still believes
in the still long nights of pacing
and worrying, of staring at small screens
hoping the magic of certainty
will return, light up his fingers,
and illuminate the slowly dimming
remainder he knows is lessening
as he stares frozen ahead,
still stuck in the backstory…

and there,
behind each of them,
the shadow I always called
the Real Me.  The slender
man, perfect, fanatic,
holding fast
to a parcel of words clamped together
into solid new worlds
that I imagine will last longer
than these reflections.
That may exist for a long time
after me, 
without needing
the others to do so. 

Was it worth it
to go this route, I wonder,
to sneer at those three,
turn away from seeing them
and focus on
the blinding light, the vision
of a body of work left behind
that made that shadow seem
so solid and preferable? 

I chased that light
all these years, saying it was
what made me, but perhaps all it was
depended upon each of them in turn
and it was wrong of me
to claim, “but really, I’m something else…”
every time I got too dismissive
of those ways of being.  Maybe
I should have taken better care of them.
Maybe the shadow I thought was the real me
would have been a better man
if I’d been better to the men I thought
I never was.

I can’t speak ill of
any of them now.
Stroke their heads,
let them go,

think about what I am now
instead of what I was:
poet, artist, failure
at the general business of living;
as always, a shadow
of my self.