This spirit has always craved mystery
Of trying for the seemingly impossible;
And yet it fears failure
At the end of a long game;
It fears erasure,
Fears unsaved progress,
Lost

But that was then,
This is now
Game Genie,
Changed it all,
Shifted the odds,
Way back when,
But it was never really the game
or the game system
That was at stake;
It was the mind,
The controller of the hands
holding the game control,

It was the mind shuffling between
Levels of life,
Competition in game,
At school,
At home,
From which friends were those
Fellow players
Sifted out and held close,
For keeps.

Along the way
The cartridges get dusty,
The disks scratch,
The software glitches,
We become tired,
We get distracted
We stop playing, because
Life…

Our fingers need only work the buttons once more,
To remember the sequences,
To do it just
Right
To beat that Boss,
To escape that trap,
To remember it was never
About winning it all
On the first try,
Unless you had “backup”,
I, you, we all
Were never meant to game alone,

But we got older
And we saved our games
And some tucked them away,
Forgetting
Each other

We got older
Our relationships got complicated
And became new games,
Complete with bosses
And real became fake, and fake real

Never mind the console,
Or the title
truthfully,
We are all trying to beat it,
This epic game.
We get minor victories,
And the harsh truth being
We will all eventually get
Game Over

In radically accepting
My eventual,
final KO,
eventually,
I strive to make my own sequences;
Reset to replay my favorite games;
Reconnect with my backup;
And break the rules
That bound me to a fear of failure

If I am going to one day end
I can not
live the game
Afraid to even play.