What's the cause, that I should think of leaving her?
My eyes and heart, daily, pressing her and Danny away...
Its here in my dreams that I've held all these years
dreams held against all the waiting and poverty of school.
I've been naive thinking that an education
could separate me from our carnivorous reality.
Its fighting at all levels in the under thickets of success
and the dreamers and the weak are the fodder here.
Its no wonder, then, that I look askance at my love;
its easier, at thirty,
than seeing myself as a dreaming fool.
I don't love how much less I am than the dreams I held
but I can't press her away because she does.
gallagher
9 July 1977
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —