Restart? Re-begin?

But where and when and why?

You ask me these questions

In disbelief.

In relief

I have no easy answers,

For I am with you

On this quest.

The rest

Of them have perished,

As heroes tend to do,

When in peril.

We flip the Dummies Guide to Quests

Looking for our answers among notes in the margins,

Wriggly red arrows between lines,

Cryptic doodles inspired by hasty telephone calls

And the random numbers found

On billboards and odometers.

Nothing but confusion.

It lacks cohesion.

We wander the labyrinth of words on words

Paper-cutting our dirty fingers in our haste,

As page leads to page leads to blurbs and titles

And the thin-thinner-thick-thin-thinnest bar code

Starts looking ominous with its thirteen unlucky digits

Prefaced by four letters,

ISBN.

Perhaps a clue resides in the abbreviation?

I is for the intelligence needed to complete the quest.

S is for the simplicity of the answers.

B is for the beauty of riddles within riddles.

N is for the nagging feeling this is all in vain!

Thus we restart, re-begin,

Ad infinitum,

On page one, chapter one, opening paragraph,

Until it is with wrinkled skin and gray hair

We raise our eyes to the blurred sky

And say with wonder in our feeble hearts,

“We quest for something, anything,

For nothing makes life more worth living

Than having a purpose, a goal.

Everything else is meaningless drool

Out of the mouths of babes and mad fools.”