The desire rises.
Lapping against the bulwarks
—structures designed to buy time—
until it finds the cracks.
Trickling, pouring, flooding, it picks me up and throws me.
To resist is to drown.
The desire—for travel, distance, to put miles between me and
all this.
To hear a different water lapping, crashing.
To look up at points of light, long looked to for navigation.
To ponder and solve the cosmic questions, problems of grandeur.
To forever leave the mundane behind.
Longing for grand adventure and challenges,
whilst drowning in the common.
Would that I could see the windmills afresh,
and tilt once more!
But, alas, (and woe to us!) this world crushes
grinds like wheat the
idealistic,
discards like chaff the naively noble,
until they, too, gnash their teeth
and use their weeping tears to oil the machinery that crushes
their fellows.
**The "tilting at windmills" reference is from Don Quixote.
