ambition

Fly Fly Brooklyn Birdie

Thundering upstairs neighbor
Where are you going?
Walking back and forth
From midnight to morning.

Your footsteps betray
A sense of unease
A life’s work undone
Malignant ambition.

Is it a family dynamic
That’s left you pacing the miles?
Your mother perhaps who lives downstairs.
A man burdened as someone’s child.

Someday you’ll fly lighter than air
Not even stomp up the stairs
To the third floor, one farther away
Then glide off the rooftop and soar.

Or perhaps your mother may drag you
Flapping and squawking
Up to the top of the nest
And fling you out over the streets of Brooklyn.
If she knows what’s best.

In the Absence of Ambition

Sometimes, the voices in my head are so loud, they come out of other people’s mouths. The “should” becomes the theme of self destruction. Wayward desires conspire to confiscate the joy of a passion or an honest vocation. If I heed the voices, hurled from surely loving directions, I may become lost in a dilemma of indecision, self reproach, even loathing. Yes, it can be turned against the host–an autoimmune anti agent of urgency.

If the throttle of messages is regulated, there comes a stillness, pervasive and persuading, to ease the force of steel will. A light and modest unleashing can then take place, in the absence of murderous ambitions.