I lost 5 years of life today Not by smoke, fear, or Doctor's remedy. No accident, retrospectively is the way Lost opportunity is my malady. I only play the Blue Danube On piano, and then the first few bars. I hardly have the skill at soccer All chance of youthful practice gone. No career in nature, as once dreamt. Coupled with days shared with David Attenborough. No line of girlfriends, waywardly wanted. Yet bums and boobs seen straining to excess. Paradoxically. All these, language, literature, and more. Are things of which I little saw. Yet I remember Friends and Neighbours (intimate much more than the family meal). And 'life training', the Price is Right Of these, internal inward sight. Yet muppets gobbled all those years - even Blue Peter did not allay my parents' fears He-man and Thundercats gently blur With memories of the pet cat's fur. Average worship, four hours a day Spent in front of the coloured box In my mind? How many thousand adverts play Like some malignant commercial pox? I was lost in each technical event Led on by death lust and superficiality. Close up, pan back - a scream -- a FUCK No time for love, for depth, for life. A hypnotised slave to injestion of artificial light Adrift in a mental space of arbitrary reality Some centralised imagination controlling my sight Each minute twisted in cathode bias. I lost five years of life today But, perhaps, I gained ten more. I've seen enough in one dimension And sat too long in a darkened room. I'll throw off that myth I was shy, or lacking New pastures, Strauss, football, await. I'll recapture the childhood explorer In new shores religion, and depths of friendship. Diluting those memories I bear Recapturing that lost chance and kernal of youth.
