Continuing in the series dedicated to The Twilight Zone and as requested by my eldest daughter, from Season 1, Episode 24:

Long Live Walter Jameson
by Michael Romani

There in that timeless dimension
Of which the mortal coil might mention
There in a story teller's legacy
Built on happiness mixed with infinity
It's on this hour of moon swept night
Where Walter Jameson brings history to light

He conjures up the dead as though still alive
Dripping his honeyed stories as though from a hive
Reading pages from a tragic diary
He lays waste as the villain did to the fair city
The stories told are detailed beyond simply history
And this nightmare begins with noon's complexity

Books are best but not to the absent minded professor
Some deeper truths are best kept from confessors
Conservation leads to a quiet dinner's invitation
While the watcher watches in complication
An after dinner pipe over a strategic game of chess
The seeming elder seeks a way to make the younger confess

Time marches on until its end - for at least some of us
The seeming elder begins his slow questioning business
A quest of the other's age is quietly but insistently raised 
Jameson's youthfulness is surmised and not praised
In the mirror, the aged man point out all of the evidence
All of which signifies its own particular sort of relevance

It is as though Jameson had lived through all these pages
It is noticed tat he speaks so eloquently mankind's stages
The elder man pulls Matthew Brady's photos from its shelf
And there seated might as well be Professor Jameson himself
A magnifying glass brings out all the crucifying details
In a moment of illuminated truth, he now reveals

The men engage in an extremely candid bit of discussion
Laying out all of the implications and cross repercussions
The senselessness of how all men's lives roll on by
Seemingly, almost over from the moment a baby first cries
If only there was some sort of path to immortality
There was and is and was provided Jameson through alchemy

It turns that instead of a road to eager, eternal happiness
Jameson has learned over and over just who he will miss
Such things as these need to be heartily considered
Before choosing this path's decision might be rendered
To some sense that is profounder than deepest philosophy
It is death that gives life its meaning, not immortality

We love a precious rose because it will soon be gone
There are few among us who would love the more permanent stone
Fear of death is the ban of a wicked form of cowardice
A form of sin that most of us longingly embrace and readily envince
But there comes a time in which there is a worth to dying
And that such dying might be met without the mortal crying

There is a loneliness in a singular path of immortality
Where we learn we get no wiser as simple pages of history
In all the days we have been blessed and given and lived
And in all the sorrows embraced we are given and forgived
These we live in all of our human web of colored passion
Facing life's momentous turbulence with well met compassion

There is a need that goes beyond all other sorts of need
Where souls perish as casually as they learn to bleed
To love and be loved is a miracle that goes beyond belief
It is what feeds true morality with it aching grief
Each of us coming to our own in a morass of conclusions
Each of us intruded on by self-inflicted intrusions

Past mistakes urgently creep up to catch and trap us
No matter how hard we press to seek other business
A shot rings out into the otherwise stillness of night
As a past love of Jameson's decides to put all to right
In the end, we put down all of our very best defenses
It might be surrender but others might call it a coming to senses

Moment by moment, from the moment of birth, man returns to dust
Because this is as it is and what it is that simply must
Dust, only dust; this is what all of a life ends as we are
Returning to that deep nothing as we reached earnestly for stars
There in the dust is always where even the best of us end
However reluctant, we find that death is in the end, our friend

(c) July 5, 2017  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved