Decades of Expression Grinding Down

 Journaling for decades,
I sometimes look back on
Who I used to be...
What I used to feel...
The words I used to write...
It often feels so alien...
Something from another life...
Love poems,
Heart felt at the time,
Now feel like lies...
The subjects of those thoughts
Have long since dissociated 
From those feelings...
Long since frozen in glaciers of time
Compared to the heat once described,
White hot...
"As long as I live"...
"The rest of our lives"...
And the most heinous lie of all,
"Till death do us part"...
Death comes in many forms, I suppose...
I've lived lifetimes
Since the boy who wrote sonnets,
Pined over crushes,
And believed that romantic love
Was a forever thing...
Everything changes...
Love isn't a static installation...
I cringe at my former innocence 
Sometimes...
And sometimes I miss it...
That willingness to risk hurt...
The noble causes...
The saving of damsels in distress...
That naïve literal belief
In the butterfly effect...
That a high school poem
Written in iambic pentameter
Could subtly change the world...
Or make me become
A household name
Because my words had power
Beyond the confines of my own ego...
Sweet, innocent ego...
Just a tender, soft-boiled egg
Waiting to be cracked...
I couldn't see the personal cataclysms
Lurking in the shadows
Just over the horizon...
Couldn't see beyond the mist,
The fog of inexperience...
Ouija boards with co-eds...
The false prophecies of Stygian witches...
Never expected decades
Of non-metaphorical chronic pain...
Couldn't see the reality
Of skipping town
To delay a warrant...
Sleeping in my car,
Cooking breakfast on a propane burner,
Pancakes in a parking lot
On a winter's day
In Portsmouth, NH...
Frosty waves hitting the storm wall
Just beyond an icy boardwalk...
All the tourist attractions 
Boarded up until springtime...
I didn't see multiple divorces
Breaking me down, 
Making me doubt my ability to be loved...
Making me doubt the sincerity
Of my own emotional center...
I write harder things now
When I'm not waxing philosophical cosmology to a high shine...
I never thought I'd get to a point
Where I no longer feared death,
Not out of bravery,
But simple resignation...
An anxiety attack is now no more
Than a deep sigh...
Walk it off...
Walk on...
It feels like eons have passed 
Since I took pleasure in rhythm and rhyme...
Romanticism or innocent righteousness....
Just another bubble in the quantum froth...
Still striving for higher consciousness
While grinding my days for a paycheck...
But those old journal entries,
Those old poems,
Those weathered fictions on yellowing pages...
I can barely feel them anymore...
Like dreams you know you had,
But can't remember
Once you hit the snooze button for the last time and start the slow process of waking up...
Passion turns to stone sometimes...
Loving gazes to thousand yard stares...
Delicacy to sawdust...
Bones to cold steel...