Here is the part both hard and easy:
When you see what’s missing and it’s
all that you (simply) stopped doing

while you went about earning your keep,
all the choices you made in favor of a
full wallet, which isn’t ever so full, is it?

Not nearly so full as what isn’t there,
what was (simply) left out, all the songs
left unwritten all the pages unfilled

all the soul that stopped pouring
from your pen. So hard, I know, to see them
not there but not there they are,

and the easy, and the hard: what you pick up,
and what you put down. Simple as that.
Hard, hard as that, too.