When A Young Man Feels Old (1st Draft)

What does it mean for a young man to feel old?
When he stops dead on lonely streets and searches back,
always back, into his labyrinth past
and surfaces with countless, folded pictures,
Should he fear the passing of time?
What grave, unnatural thing is this,
When a young man feels old?

From a distilled day I plucked certain sounds;
a nervous cry in a subway tunnel;
the creaking of your floorboards,
and i became lost in them.
Young people should feel, should run,
Should have the privilege to be ignorant.

I remember, one gray October day,
speeding past the silent lake,
That when i looked out that way,
I felt infinity twist and break,
deep within me its wounded claw
dragged and then was lost,
To me and to the water lost.
And I became an open wound.

Now I walk under the weight of reflection,
Gripped, because everything is attached,
I am inadvertently focused on my past,
I am held at a distance from the moment.
And yes, there is poetry in my life,
but the most telling exchanges are wordless.