Archive 04/27/10 - (2)

   

Growing Oldest

                                                                  

Once upon a finally defining time ago,

I grew old, without knowing how or why.

It all happened in a passage neither fast nor gradual, exactly,

 

Rather more slowly than water freezing into a glacier,

In an age of cold lasting innumerable gloomy millenniums,

Or than the morphing of hominine precursors into Homo sapiens.

 

Whatever caused the inexorable metamorphosis

Rendered me ancient, in a matter of timeless decades, years, days,

Measured by the perfunctory beatings of my myriad hearts,

 

The deeds done in the sacred name of routine's rituals and traditions,

The covenants, promises, handshakes made and broken,

To honor and shame mankind's belief in decency, right reason.

 

All I was told, as old became indistinguishable from ancient, primordial,

Was that what my being was experiencing

Was the natural flow, progression, evolution of death's yes and no

 

And that I shouldn't fret over the setting in of decay,

Whether it be the most common mental letting-go — forgetting —

Or the infinitely more obscure, sordid disorders of the psyche.

 

And after all, what could I, being merely far too human, do

But accept my provisional, expendable fate,

With aplomb, equanimity, without the slightest complaint,

 

Bite my tongue, keep from spewing jeremiads, screeds, expletives

Against God or the Antichrist or more amorphous destiny, fate,

Say my praises to the powers, agencies, deities that be,

Who'd generously granted me the privileges of mortal existence,

For the time allotted my allotted time's lot in life,

Take a deep sigh, and resign myself to the inevitable?

 

Then, once upon a finally defining time ago,

Old was over, and I was once and for all, forever after,

Out of years, suspended above the abyss,

 

Rising, lifting, ascending into the void between earth and firmament,

Sensing the incipience of my resurrection,

The eternal youth bequeathed those who outlive their oldest souls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                               

 

04/27/10 - (2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 
   
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