A Shadow Casts

Somewhere a shadow casts

Itself across this life of mine

And with each forgettable day

I feel its soft pitch periphery

Widening and darkening like

The undulating spectre of a

Unknowable sea-dread, rising

To pierce the surface with its

Portentous terror.

I am now twenty-six, an age

I once did not imagine I’d happily

Reach, and yet I feel the shadow

Stretching, I feel years uncoiling

Like a sign of treacherous neglect;

Worrying is not writing; patience is

Not prudence; and producing now

And again is no honing of the craft,

The shadow accuses. Indeed, am I

Not tempting Fate or Time to thrust

Themselves into my tarrying, slicing

My work into evanescent finality?

And so I sense a shadow creeping,

In work and leisure, its ineffable

Vastness stirring; the unlived,

The unloved, the unwritten,

The unwrought all wavering

In the waxing shade; a warning

That whatever I deign not to do

In the paralysed present will

Be irrevocably withheld, once

The blackness bloats to blot

Out all light of awareness.