Ambition

By Cliff Lake

 

Ambition

 

Ambition.

What is it but another path

That ends where all roads must?

Can you be more than what you are?

Have you fulfilled the potential

You are told to have?

Do you control your fate?

Have you escaped the box you were assigned?

Or did you just find a bigger box,

And painted it so that you cannot see the walls?

Who has told you what to be?

Or are you the influencer

Speaking pretty promise

Holding in your hands no substance,

Just the allure of cash ungained.

Ambition.

It too ages,

Becomes defined by experience,

Failure or success,

Promises skewed by circumstance,

And at last,

The mirror on your wall.

Stasis comes to all things,

Even the tides will slow.

So, we head into a new year by the calendar,

But the seasons do not know that.

Fish will spawn in their proper time,

The bear will leave its den by the moon,

Or simple hunger.

They will not ask of your midnight promises,

They will not care to hear your plans.

They only wish the space and peace they have already earned

By their simple existence beside you -

And do not understand why you must take more than your due.

Ambition.

It is a date on a calendar,

It is a fistful of paper granted transitory value

Subject to the ambitions of others,

Holding more paper,

Planning more dates to do things by,

And forgetting to look to the tides,

Or the moon.

Ambition.

It’s just a word.

How does it kill so easily?

 

Cliff Lake 12/30/2022

Copyright © Clifford Lake 2022

Location: Dalton, MA, USA

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