Keeps Me Young

Keeps Me Young

The future is where our eyesight trails off.
We can never see it.

We will never feel the future.
We keep chasing it into the street.

The future doesn’t want to be didactic.
If it let us in, all we’d do is send back

messages. Dear Mom and Dad of my youth,
you did it, you had two daughters

and we are adults. It’s great here, none
of the animals we had are alive, but new cats

come to you, don’t worry. Nothing extra
will prepare you except for everything

you are doing already or you already
did. The future inches away, but only because

it is protective. This is how it taught us
to walk.

That’s it, that’s it, a little farther, it will
catch us even as we

plummet. Dear me of my youth,
you are young every day

before this one, each alive day
you are full of not having lived it all yet.