Would that we were young and old

at the same time and would that we could

do it all again in a microsecond of 30 years

I could unsay the few words that I said that

changed your life forever sending you off  to

the oceans and the land and the world of academia

a wife and a child in tow…would that we were still

the natural beauty of 25 years old and born

to privilege and now that fortunes have risen and fallen

we could go back in time and follow in our fathers’

footsteps as if that were possible to ever do. Time

once stopped in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn

in a Golden Age before the Milennium and milennials

and the world was a beautiful stage, not the postage

stamp of a Broadway stage or dinner theatre

of Tony and Tina’s wedding, but wide open spaces

above and beyond the calls of duty and home fires

now burning. Stepping onto an avenue being overrun

now by gentrification and guilty pleasures

of responsibility and broken dreams ever a cycle

of creation and destruction with the goddess Kali

in tow and towing and ebbing and flowing like tides,

through canals, upstream, downstream, shovelers

and grovelers, men and women working in shops,

shops for cars, for baked and canned goods, homemade

and not homemade. All of it and all of them coming and

going like the tide and with the sun and the moon

and millions of christ figures hanging their laundry

from tenement windows back when the earth

at the center of everything like they believed

before the earth became round and organic

and warmed and cooled without a consciousness

or enlightenment or anything we could touch or wipe

clean our homes and our cars and the subway and urban

and suburban restlessness, steady and fast, slow

as molasses or fast as a jackrabbit, a dust bunny

tumbleweed rolling under the bed, forgotten,

creating life of its own.

KELLY J POWELL is a poet native to Long Island writing in the tradition of the Beat Poets.