A Failure Of The Imagination

Did you imagine any of this correctly
back when you lay in your room
before dawn and school and first love
and tried to foresee your life? If you did,
did you get the background right as well,
never mind the foreground and the bad business
offstage that clouded the formal dialogue 
and gave it a layer of unease you could taste —
if you did, if you got any or all of it right, why
are you here now trying to survive all of this?
Unless you thought it would fade by the time
you got here, or perhaps that you’d be among those
who would vanquish all the awfulness? Maybe you are
still at it, still making it better on center stage;
maybe you’re part of the problem; maybe
you never believed it would happen at all
and you trusted your childhood vision was going to be
wrong. Maybe you can’t even say why you pushed on
and persevered but now that you’re here 
and the decay and rot of the world is so evident,
you look back and imagine how it should have been
so clear, considering how far you’ve come from 
dawn and school and first love
and how none of any of that
came to be or stayed true.