How To Grow Old

While sleep evades,

facts sneak up on you from your blinder side, news from dust;

Growing older, not getting older, was the way

of course; leaving everyman with little to say;

Underlying predications directed you to stay,

even after being for the second time betrayed.

After your spinesteel has lost its spring, weak with rust,

you finally figure out

the uselessness of Why, the senselessness of Answer;

The off key signature of too little sleep, muting Logic and confusing Reason.

You think you have suffered quite enough, thank you,

except soon will no one be left to walk that plank, only you?

Right before Spirit is unceremoniously yanked from you,

your spiraling imperfect pirouette leaves behind a painful dancer.

With no set of oars in your ragged sailboat

the end of sailboat season finds you stupid and adrift,

trying to figure out just how little time is left of each day.

More futile than worry, as deadly as isotope infection,

tough doubts from your old neighborhoods’ poorest section

point the angles of your beliefs in different directions.

Getting older, growing older, it ends the same either way.

Perchance births and deaths are really mere milestones,

marking time in a much longer run,

odds are fair to good that this is possibly the case.

Electrons will continue to be measured and traced,

batteries discarded but with a different type replaced.

Still, obviousness and certainty demand to be faced,

last song worth dancing to has begun;