Last Words of Atlantis: a poem

Staff Writer
Do we spend the rest of our lives missing things?
          We are mired in memories, of things that happened and things we wished that happened. So rarely do we look forward, so rarely do we let ourselves forget. We long for the past, reaching for something that recedes farther and farther away into the distance, escaping us.
          Often times we try to catch the shore, knowing full well that the water will slip through our hands and that the same wave will never come twice. The regret clings to our bodies like a second skin, so unforgiving we mistake it for our own until we do not know how to be without it.  And weighed heavy by this nostalgia, we are dragged deeper and deeper still, until inevitably we drown.
How cruel is time that it be so linear/ How cruel is time that we can never go back/
          The past, the present, the future. The distance traveled does not matter when one is running in circles with regret written in blood on his knuckles. There is no time for apologies when one is being haunted by a poltergeist with his own face. It leaves ransom notes on bathroom mirrors in the house where people no longer live.
/How cruel that we are only human.                             scan0001