Green

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia."
Upon review, the past and future are strange
brothers, sons of a protective parent
with a brow that is vaguely familiarly shaped.
The parent, at present, opened to welcome
a high-flying, steam-washed fiber that follows.

I never took much from that lint, or the wind it follows.
Now, though, I see its hopeful sense of nostalgia
and it spreads its fluffy entrails as a welcome
to a new string of thought that breeds strange.
I wind its intestines in my fingers, a bow shaped
out of one thousand, lucky to be a parent.

In order to appear like the thoughts it is parent
to, she folds in on herself and the elastic that follows,
until she is one mass, one that is shaped
on a growing mound of spaghetti nostalgia.
She pleases herself with being strange,
her innards giving her a strangling, warm welcome.

It makes me uncomfortable, this welcome
that has been through breeders for years with her parent.
Perhaps it is justified that I am strange,
instead of the imperceptible line of youth that follows,
though I find it sure they will ponder nostalgia
because it stirs up what makes us human-shaped.

I remember being on a hillside with a bean-shaped
cramp that hit me with his open, gripping welcome.
I think of it when I think of my nostalgia,
for my past pain is always -- the future is apparent.
A train for stupid emotion manifold follows.
It tears me away and I become again strange.

But even while the past is weird and the future strange
each person finds oneself being shaped
by each successful thought that follows.
A friendly embrace to clothing, and a welcome
to each new bit of knowledge to which we are a parent.
We live in a world where everything reminds of nostalgia.

What follows us as we live is strange
as the nostalgia that shaped our nostalgic glances,
and our welcome for present to be the parent of our future.

Alternate title: Sestinas Are Long-Winded and Difficult
I rather dislike this.  It was kind of like, "Well, I guess I could go with this." Then the second stanza, and I felt okay, and then I just feel worse and worse about it with each successive stanza. Ooooh well. It must be done.