Wandering In The Dark Poem by Mike Smith

I consider it likely against my best interests to wonder on
And often times I make a concerted effort to keep it far from the front of my mind
But none of us has much control over which way our minds might wander
And when the night is long
And my thoughts are left to converse amongst themselves
Recurrently you come to mind
And hold my attention hostage even from however far away
There are times when I'll resist it
Force you from my mind and make myself think of other things
Any arbitrary things to stop myself from wasting even one more fraction of a second in contemplation
But other times I'll let the memories and all the questions they bring with them run their course
There is joy in it
Remembrance of a treasured time
When there was good in all things
And all things were good
A time of laughter and freshness
Of beginnings and smiles
Of late nights
Long walks
Great talks
And happiness beyond measure
The time of fireflies
And shooting stars
The summer of dreams come true (or so it [then] seemed)
Yes it brings me great elation to revisit those times
But inevitably
What it leads to
Is the memories of the next chapter
In which the joy had vanished
And left in its void was a pathetic mixture of sorrow and pity
Of confusion and longing
Of failure without fault
And a convoluted muddling of the wishes for that which never truly was
And that which, now, almost certainly can not be
An intense bitterness that even in all its overpowering enormity
Can't drown out the sweet
How long will I be condemned to regret entirely what all happened
Yet revel in it all the more
To hold on to a fools hope that history could repeat
Only this time with a better understanding of the stakes
And, resultingly, a different outcome
Deep down I know it not to be possible
Such a thing happens not even once a blue moon
But rather an indigo sun
So rare that few of us have yet seen it once
And none twice
No, the past is in stone now
Cold, and without voice or life
And the future
Undoubtedly
Will bear no resemblance to that not so long ago time
When we walked between the trees in the dark
Guided only by distant astrological bodies
And you
Entirely unexpectedly
First grabbed my hand
And so doing
Sealed my fate