A Lingering Taste of Sadness

When I came to drink from the well of life
It left a lingering taste of sadness
Regrets cling stubbornly to my thoughts
Like lichen does to a dull gray stone.
Rumination upon unattained dreams,
Reflection upon unfufilled ambitions,
Obsessively one-sided infatuation,
Desire that never blossomed into love.
It's taken me too long to realize
That there's no rich vein of gold here,
No coal with its diamond potential,
Just a weathered, pitted, glacier-scarred stone
That's too often taken for granite.

The ancient ones left us strange petroglyphs;
Cryptic messages chiselled into stone,
Undecipherable, irretrievable knowledge.
I feel cheated when I look at their carvings.
There's so much I should understand by now
Given the lessons that I've had to absorb;
So many mistakes I could've learned from.
But when I drank deeply from the well of life
It left me with the bitter disappointment
Of that lingering taste of sadness.