My canes and crutches I had taped back together,
The sleeves of my robe reclaimed from the depths,The magic leached nightly from my fingertips,
The plagiarized spells to raise a storm that raised
Only those slight breezes theft and imitation promise us,
All these, showing my centuries, I insisted
Were mine. The secret truth is they were,
As I theirs, as I every phrase's, every word's
I ever learned. I opened the fat text of the magus
When I was fourteen, bored and boarded
In a heap of bricks no longer exists, commanded
By a librarian, if I wanted to read magic, I needed
To begin my apprenticeship among the unmagical
Adults who dreamed of being wrong but couldn't
Trust their dreams. The text held nothing but cowardice
And a retreat from the only true question
That presses on an apprentice: is this anything
That will work, for me, is this anything that will work?
Forty years and forty nights vanished under me
And I found myself become the old humbug in a poem
By a younger man, when I had thought I was the one earned
The right to play true Caliban and cry to dream again.
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