RE-EVALUATION

Like burps coming up again,

Reminding of what has been…

Realizations of same

Still in the game,

One thought it gone way back when!

–

Depressed like a little boy,

One’s nature crushes joy…

To find growing up

Has gone corrupt,

The same attitudes employed.

–

Nice being appreciated,

Yet treated as if lower rated…

The treatment is there

‘Spite knowing they care,

Is this how he’s been integrated?

–

One feels that “progress” is nil,

When climbing the very same hill…

“Flowers For Algernon”*

He’s embarked upon,

His place in life seems to stand still!

–

Why go over it all again,

Will he be this way til the end…

Nothing much really changed

He thought it re-arranged,

Must be the same signals he sends?

–

One jokes about being well-used,

One doesn’t want to be excused…

For being unable

To sufficiently enable

Oneself to feel renewed.

–

Of course one does understand

The miracles God may command…

Taking this clay

And molding away,

To do something He sees as grand!

–Jonathan Caswell

* Flowers for Algernon”…a short story by Daniel Keyes, published as a novel in 1966. Allusion to this story is made for suggesting  that the subject is past prime and is failing…to the point of seeing past personality traits still very much a part of his life…despite a lifetime struggle to escape them. The short story is about a laboratory mouse and a man who both are treated to an experiment that pushes them both rapidly to the very height of intelligence…then the mouse dies and the man returns to his low intellegence self…leaving a woman who fell in love with the intelligent version of him…behind.