You can’t have it all, but
You can have an epiphany a decade in the making break over your mind like a rotten egg, doomed and wasted and foul.
It chants that you are a long-broken person, and you do your best to ignore the verses of the psalm that echo “there’s no fixing it, there’s no fixing it...”
You can have your tears leaking through the cracks quickly mended by kisses from someone who has learned how to harvest gold from life,
Who has painted his own broken bits back together,
Who freely admits his kinship with Pagliacci but places neither judgment nor shame on his sorrow,
Who has found riches where the rich dare not set foot,
For the monsters of their own make that lurk, barring the way to the vault of constancy, would make ribbons of them should they attempt to cross.
You can have admiration for your lover take flight in the wild applause of your gaze as he makes fools of those who place less worth in themselves than they do in their possessions,
Who makes a mockery of the mad world’s worship of success, simply by existing,
Whose clumsy yet sublime mastery of life you, yourself, seek to possess, avaricious student that you are.
You can have sleepy breath beneath blankets on a cold early autumn morning, while your eyes dance across the ceiling perceiving the stars and your perspectives align into new constellations in the glorious void of understanding, awaiting better cosmologies to give meaning to their existence.
You can’t have it all, but there is this.