Power In Decline

What is power in decline?

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Is it surreptitiously missing from the headlines

of the newspapers which one proclaimed from on high

the arrival of the great society?

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Is it found in the daily doldrums of existence,

a constant undertone of sadness within an outward facing lie?

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Or is there something more to falling from grace

than simply silence and a fleeting sense of place?

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Dragging oneself, bare-knuckles and all,

through the deepest pits of despair

only but scratches the surface,

of an otherwise desolate ride.

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From bow to stern, and shore to shore

we may long for the power of yore,

but in that memory we become victimized anew

to our sense of loss and misuse.

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Perhaps that is power in decline;

the selfish realization that failure

is not a natural state of existence

but instead the result of our own persistence.

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