Though it's easy
to romanticize youth,
even during those
allegedly simpler times
we always craved more.

Life churned,
and between the blinding tedium
of rote learning
and the bliss of
drunken stoned tripping nights
riding around in cars
and hoping beyond hope
for the hot one
from 9th grade
to get naked for us,
we even then
could (just a little)
understand,

and with that,
our anger
and sadness
boiled.

Habits die hard
if at all,
more often digging themselves
in deeper
like larva buried under the skin
hunts for the heart.

So that
one day
when you finally start to stir
from an eon's slumber
to discover how fools
live their lives

it seems
impossible
to clean the wounds
now healed over
and invisible
to the naked eye.

But that seeming
is just another manifestation -
infestation, if you will -
of the worms,
eating from the inside out
and carrying away the corpse
for another round at play
in the fields of life
and death.

So now, that said
here we are
with the opportunity
to attain the blissful
realization
of what it is,
what we are,

and thereby
finally begin
to open the flower
of true peace
like a thunderous storm
enters and overturns
a hot Summer morning.

Whither the worms,
youth might ask
from deep down
in that old place
where childish dreams
once lay in wait?

They are us,
and we are them,
as incense turned to smoke
seasons the cushion and alter
with plum blossoms and spice.

This is the truth
so long sought,
so far away,
yet never more
then a heartbeat's
distance.