TheBanyanTree: twenty

[Mike Pingleton]

        when I was twenty, when I was twenty and I 
        could run ten miles and jump rivers and climb
        tall mountains, when I was twenty and could
        howl at the moon and fight other men for the
        love of women who loved me because I was
        twenty, when my blood would race at the
        pull of a woman's tides,

        when I was twenty the heat of my being twenty
        blinded me from all that was tender and 
        exquisite, all that was passion or kindness,
        blind to all qualities tethered to no form or 
        figure, the inside unseen to the sightless at
        twenty.

        the very cells of that season have been swept
        away.