When I Consider How My Days Were Spent Poem by David McLansky

When I consider how my days were spent
My aimless drift in hapless, cluttered years
The foolish choices wherein my pride was rent
I the butt of mockery and sneers;
I who was a marvel in my youth
The basking object of a dawning praise,
Soon learned that fame inspires abuse,
That lesser souls will seek to block your way;
I who sought to live as independent,
To use my brain to best life's game of chance,
Was proved in court an ill-prepared defendant,
Misled by misperceptions of romance;
Yet in the days I sense I have remaining,
Although my sun is shadowed in the west,
I strain to make my final hours sustaining:
My ripened love a story of success.