We are children and die as children.

Kindergarten world proceeds in comitragic play--
childhoods never end, not until epilogues.
How adult to believe the Rubicon eighteen
or twenty one or whatever age--each bank is
a mirrordoor to this repeating forever hallway.
I see people, living people, and they are kids.
I see myself, my grizzled frizzled responsible 
self and I am a child. The cosmos refracts
through these spectacles, but a few years'
time is a failed grand scheme, a farce called
maturation. At the stage's end, the theater
floods with tears; each of us, we young,
we die as we are, and a child's last
breath is always a tragic death.