Elegy

"mourns a person, place, time, or idea that has been lost"

and it seems the lightest, but "ideas" I feel most at the moment

- while racing to clean up my art studio's years of necessary neglect -

because they were the nearly-avoidable yet somehow inevitable

sacrifices, stopped a step away from

becoming something endlessly more than the sum of their parts

and I had to let them lay malnourished and stillborn

and soon I'll have to explain in the most round-about ways why

the simplest things still cannot be done.

linger, fester, and then miraculously rising from the ashes,

now fulfilled in forms previously unimagined

and just as I clap my hands to celebrate their

unexpected victory

the last step remains out of reach... and I ask again

"how much longer, or will they never live?"