Prematurity

 To be torn from a womb prematurely,

To be left to learn to breathe before my lungs even expand.

To be awakened long before anyone's alarm goes off.

To be awake like a ghost in the dark and feel alone in the gloom of awareness.

To learn to read before your peers.

The alphabet seems trivial compared with calculus and essays in year 1.

To be the first and yet the last.

To travel empty roads....kilometres and kilometres of empty roads,

For they are the ones less travelled.

To be fulfilled by lessons learned by centuries,

To be abandoned by reason 

And lose myself in delicious blissful madness.

To wash in waters dirtied by boredom.

To lose the plug and float mid-air instead. 

To yearn for freedom most only dream of at the end of the journey,

To realise how to live ahead 

And yet survive, thrive even.

To risk the rewards, to be afraid and do it anyway.

To understand the book before you read it,

To live ahead....and yet always be behind.

To realise the meaning 

To understand animal souls 

To channel music in silence,

To expand horizons with a smile.

To suffer the consequences of love lost before you walk,

To understand how to live regardless.

And to return the loans,

The loans they did not mean. 

The smiles that did not reach the eyes, 

The souls that are shallower than an eye in the desert.

Heed the warning in your heart,

And still try.

Because the meaning must be somewhere,

Promised by the wind.

There must be a sense to it,

Even if it's 42.

Simplistic answers for simple minds.

Basic tenets for basic beings.

And yet more.

More.

Always more.

Growing in the broth of this poor diet.

Despite the lean helping.

For the strength seems to emanate from those who were torn out of that soup early.

For the chick that cracks the egg a day early,

The bird who falls from the nest and has to learn to fly from the ground.

This is where I come from and this is where I will remain.

For I cannot devolve.

I cannot be ordinarily assembled, 

Although I'd like to be.

For ease of consumption, it would be preferable.

But to stand at the gate

And say I have lived,

And learned, and loved, and yearned, and cried in despair.

That is not a bad life.

That is how I will make my dragon's hoard.