Regret

REGRET

Regret should be old, worn out, tired, lost;
Not immortal, everlasting, new again,
        Each dawn forgetting what has gone before.
A must-see sense of something worse,
Inhibits making newer memories.

I will forgive their mockery if I mock them,
Our trespasses trespassed again,
But irreligious, the damage done,
Considered acceptable. Things went wrong,
There were reasons, we could accept at the time,
We question now, at leisure, but not at ease.
The troubling discontent is pitched too high
For us to pluck down, but should we reach up
To touch it, we might just topple ourselves,
Not the monument of our decay.

I look upon the ruins of my life, and despair.
There’s nothing left, except regret.
The past is not precious, just a tale
Of ordinary people living their lives,
        Never questioning their purpose, or
The decisions they made; only to find,
        The ghosts of the things they did or said
Come back to haunt them, without enough
Reason to fathom out why they committed
Essential life-changing errors and mistakes.

Time, being inexorable, cannot reverse
The avalanche of disasters piled up
Like wrecked cars waiting to be crushed,
Their metal being remade into something else;
But memory, being so efficient, cannot
Abide distortion or the present lie:
If only things were different, but they are not;
They never will be. If only we could take
That jangled mess and transform it into
The mind of capability it once was:
Not now, not ever again. It is as idle
As placid waters, crystal-clear, unchanged.

An inescapable tunnel of despair,
Churns material up and down, round and round
Like a cement-mixer, but what it makes
Becomes too solid, fixed, unchangeable,
Which can only mean, constant minds remain
Inflexible, cannot resolve the issue,
Remove the mistake from history,
Makes compromise acceptable. Then,
        We experience a certain loss,
Denial, illusion and despair;
The burden of remorse for things we did,
Or did not do; how and why things went wrong,
So much regret, the reasons are obscure,
And lack precise definition, leaving doubt
        The dominant concept in the mind,
Until we find another reason to be proud
Of our achievements, which denying,
We find our grief would justify regret,
That everlasting beacon of decay.