Lucky.
Could have been another time -
Inhospitable,
Less accepting,
Misunderstood.
Witch -
Fool,
Queer!
Alone. Not One.
Fantastic Voyage saved me -
Azimov,
and aliens.
Zelazny and Zimmer Bradley
enabled me -
Fantasy devotee!
Flights and Fancy kept Hope alive,
despite sissy leanings,
and a tendency toward sedition.
I would count myself brave -
safe,
smart, even!
Except that my own failing
took the form of a knight of fear,
and even that one,
born, not as some magical warrior
made for an intergalactic war,
but rather to take a farmer’s place.
There was no intellectual dream to be captured.
No secret entry into some new world.
Only a Gamer
tied to fools,
and the tall tales of Science Fiction.
Lucky.
Still!
Left alone,
I might have faded into nothing.
Rendered my Self
into a Soft and Bitter Seed!
School opened up an outlet, though -
Education,
imagination,
and an armload of Paperback books.
Suddenly, something else -
Something dreamy,
something Pure.
Some precious Words
I could endure.
And Time.
Time turns, you know.
Generations change,
and despite all the foolishness
humans never left behind,
it seems we did manage
some degree of separation
from what we earned from Evolution
by taking hold of a spare dream or two
and spinning them into
a New World of Realism.
Lucky!
We were given such a boon -
beyond anything we might have deserved.
I was anyway,
and me only a small part of BIG change.
Blessed,
Able -
Enabled!
Allowed -
to learn,
to earn,
to turn aside the Worm
that failed all those earlier iterations
then turned a Blind Eye
to me and my generation
so we could scrape something new
out of an Old World.
Left us. Lucky.
