Joy

Don’t postpone joy. The turn of the page, the slow sojourn from day to day. Lulled into complacency, the days pass like silent assassins. Dripping down the side of the candle, it’s easy to lose the prospect of joy. Settle for average, for normal, for making do. The crash of minutes drowning out the clarion of purity.
Don’t postpone joy, for soon it will be too late, a bottle of pills, a harsh collision, a choking cough.  A thief of breath, time steals. It is sadness, the days behind me, no longer to be lived or loved or laughed, only lost. Did I measure them, when I was young? Or only see them stretching like the endless road in front. No need to hurry to my destination, it would always be there tomorrow and tomorrow.
A moment, linger here among the flowers, the hill too hard to climb today. Wait for tomorrow. But tomorrows and tomorrows they careen by, faster than before. I miss you, miss the words I didn’t value enough, the times, I didn’t answer. A drawing of a tree is not the leaves upon it, but the suggestion of a tree. A map of your wrinkled skin is not your life, but a suggestion of the roads you have traveled. Or the joys you have not lived. The dance you did not do, the words you did not say.  The help you did not ask for, only the footsteps fading from sound and sight, and searching.
Don’t postpone joy, for it cannot be lived again, or loved again, or laughed again. Fleet Mercury stole it from me, his winged shoes fluttered by so fast that you were gone before I knew it or felt it or thought it.
I take your words and stamp them upon my soul. Don’t postpone joy. Live in it.