Tomorrow, I Will Change

Tomorrow, I will change when

Something terrible happens to me.

I wish I could warn myself how

It will tear my life apart.

I wish I'd know to not get

Myself into trouble.

But I don't know what I'll do wrong –so wrong–

That I'll deserve it all.

Well, tomorrow decided

To show up yesterday instead, but

That didn't really change anything,

It's still as bad as I feared.

It kind of snuck by me in the night, I guess.

It climbed from midnight, through evening and

Afternoon, and crept past me, through the new

Morning, and crawled past midnight again.

I swear I didn't see it go by,

It was too damned sneaky and decided

To wreck today by climbing into yesterday.

It was too impatient to wait, I guess.

When it got there, it must have

Perked up its ears and smiled.

It saw all the pain and weakness and blindness

I was already carrying.

It must have shone with delight,

Grinning wide when it saw all those yesterdays

Already filled with terror and humiliation.

“It's still just a boy!” it must've said to itself,“This'll be easy.”

It probably sat down for a few minutes and

Wrote it all out on a napkin or something, thinking,

“How can I tailor this to hit

All the weak points just right?”

It sure knew its business!

All those yesterdays,

So full of disintegration and panic,

It just corralled them all together.

I don't know how it did it, but

It fattened them up so much they spilled

All the way from yesterday and

Burst through to today.

“What kind of trick is that?” I ask,

Or would, if my mind wasn't pushed into tomorrow.

So now I'm stuck in tomorrow, and

I'm scared of what lurks here.

What stalks silently around me,

Ready to sneak past into my yesterdays again,

And force me ahead! ahead! ahead through all the tomorrows,

Until it finally pushes me past the last one and into the black?