Twenty-Five Thousand Candles

Twenty-Five Thousand Candles

I could use your speed to slide these streets

Like a slalom of weaving in and out burgeoning routes

Of tomorrow like a call to everything I have not yet done

In the palms of your enthusiasm

Hand-held and leaping that these towns are there for the seeking

In Thursdays and Sundays melting across pastures and pathways

Memories lighting up like a ring of candles in the dimmest of rooms

Eating away the darkness to exhume a potential long since thought dead

Abandoned in adolescence for serious tones and a man coming home

With a degree and a name and faces that look the same

Day after day and now it comes in a blaze, the change on the horizon

In the dance, shoes pirouette and reverse to forget

What was assumed to subsist, to replace with what was adrift

In that darkness bellowing mute, slain with the flames

Like slits in their throats of all those never-will-be days

Carry me like a canopy, an umbrella of leaves

To shelter the heat and the scene of all these meteors falling above the trees

Bouncing off a zest to not let that be all that is left

Challenging my own complacency to dive into a Mediterranean menagerie

Of Greek Isles and Tuscan bike ride miles pedaled away in the wake

Of this tidal wave of five-foot-two knocking over every assumption that blew

The stagnant air over in a midnight breeze stark face in my hairs standing up

And now aware that nothing will ever be the same

Knowing that mediocre is no longer the bane of what I accept

And in you I make, a choice for change of this orchestra of light

Of twenty-five thousand candles and twenty-five thousands days

From here to then I make these amends

To never believe in mediocrity