#poetry

Mesozoic Me
 
i’ve let too much slide for far too long
in favor of the life i live in my head
instead of the one i actually own
in the great wide world
which is neither great nor wide anymore
thanks to our refusal to care for the earth
to care for each other and the proliferation
of the elastic tentacles of the technology
of death that spares no one
 
now when i try to reassemble 
the pieces of the puzzle i find some are broken
some are lost and some are so unrecognizable
they seem to belong to someone else entirely
 
i’m a brontosaurus in a velociraptor world
doing my best – which isn’t very good –
to manufacture reasons to get out of bed
and find meaning in the meaningless
and when i finally do i avoid the spotlight
and hug the margins of the room 
where i occasionally encounter other left-behinds
like me lumbering slowly to the tarpits of eternity 
to become the yellowed bones of the myths of history

© 2023 RC deWinter
Published in Meat For Tea: 
The Valley Review
March 2023
#poetry