Accumulation

These years I put on like a costume,
like make up,
that I may play the part of an older man.
These wiry gray sprouts,
these creases round my eyes beating me to my smiles,
belie the child lying within.

This beard,
thick and full and my greatest deception,
that you may think me reasonable,
or respectable,
or whatever people look for in people my age,
and overlook the silliness pouring from my eyes,
this glint of mischief in all its youthful glory.

You sense in my accumulation of years
an accumulation of knowledge, which may be true.
But knowledge scattered is burdensome;
it is obesity,
and just as limiting if used in place of thinking,
or thought to be insight.

Knowledge, the great confounder,
forever taking us in circles!
Coaxing us,
all we wanderers, dreamers, scientists, schemers;
intoxicating us with your come-hither wink,
and promises of solid answers.
And all we fools follow you,
stammering arduously towards you
in the steady progress of years,
only to be dropped off where we've always been.

Still, I am left a little sturdier for my troubles,
and a little sharper,
and a little stranger.
And I can catch a glimpse,
or a whiff maybe,
of the way things really are and aren't
if I catch myself off guard and come in sideways.
Myself, my surroundings,
they fall,
like memories of a dream,
showing themselves for the imitators they are.
And I turn to look,
but it's gone.