THOUGHTS OF A POET IN THE RAIN

I’m wondering at 46 minutes past midnight. I’m wondering about me and you and everyone else out there. I wonder about what I say and how I say it. I wonder about the anger that lives within me left there by the pain of trauma that you don’t know and the war, there is always the war, how about you? and the missed chances in life to be better than I am in everything and anything. It is not so much to be introspective but to realize that there are plenty of errors in one’s life is painful. I wonder if you do that, if anyone does that. I wonder if it matters. I wish I had been a Golden Gloves Boxer just for the hell of it, a ballet dancer in my youth so a female neighbor friend could have stared in Nutcracker (she had to get a boy to play the prince and she had asked me and I politely declined… me a ballet dancer? really? yet I did dance in a ballet company when I did theater as an adult to help with an injury to my back) and then there was the war…how many of us wish we had gone back. I loved the smell of war. I regret that I didn’t go back but was surprised by the hatred here for all of us that went. Nothing like coming home and finding you are looked upon not as a veteran but as a criminal. I loved the smell of war. Does that surprise you? I loved to fight as a youth. I loved to even taste the blood in my mouth and to dish it out as I got it and yet I feared hurting another. How about you? I wonder what ever happened to the first girl I kissed, or the Tom Boy that lived on my block and who would fight and kick and throw rocks with the rest of us and I wonder if she grew up and became the beautiful woman I hoped she’d be.  I wonder about the girl who had polio and had paralyzed legs. Did she ever learn how to dance? And I wonder about you. How about you? I wonder. How about you? Do you ever wonder? Does it matter if we wonder?