This voice is getting old
as are the lungs that drive it.

I want it to come alive with roses
firing from my tongue and 
seem to spit nothing
but autumn leaves. 

Do you feel any softness
or new growth 
in anything I say?
In fact, I’m likely reaching a point

of speaking nothing but stone talk.
I don’t know yet
if these will be sling stones shaped
to fly at Goliath, or gravestones seeking
a hole to mark, newly-turned earth
in which to settle.

I’m resigned to how little
those who follow
may be able to do with what
I am beginning to say. Not like
I’ll be offering obvious
building blocks,

nothing shaped like
a foundation. I feel already

they’ll sit there in front of you
and look like obstacles or
late-life mistakes.

Maybe that’s all I’ll be 
soon: 

object lesson on overstaying
time. Ossified while longing
to still be fluid. 

Monumental.

Waiting to crumble.

If you find yourself
on workday mornings
staring into a mirror
and wondering about 
how a certain line
above your brows got there
after all the years it spent
on your mother’s face,

or about how the upward twist 
of your wry mouth’s left corner
migrated there from 
your dad’s Army photo,

or in general worrying
about this new slight slope
in your jowls,
so reminiscent now
of Uncle John, or how
the light you once saw
in your skin is now 
nowhere to be found,
dimming the essential
“you-ness” you have always known

into a simple, generic mask
of a darkening, dimming old man
getting older and dimmer 
in exactly the same way 
all the old ones in your family
darkened and dimmed,
take heart in knowing

that no matter how unfamiliar
you may seem to yourself,
how much you stray from
what you once thought
you immutably were, to those
on this side of the mirror
you will remain the same
mess we have always known
and loved and laughed at
since the first time
you stared in rapture
at your own face, not knowing
that we were in here all along,
staring back,

waiting for you to notice.

Some days
get a pass from having
to fit on the spectrum
of “good day or bad day.”

They just sit there
on the calendar
waiting to be remembered,
and never are. 

A week later,
as you toss the page
with the date into the trash,
you pause and ask yourself,

“What happened that day?
Did it even happen? Was it
the day that…no, that was
the next day…or maybe it was

the day that…no, no…” 
You crumple the paper
in a low panic at having
no memory of such a recent

blank. You can’t call it good,
can’t call it bad, can’t recall it at all.
It’s a tear in your fabric. A moment
you’re not even certain happened

although being here today
indicates you were present then.
Today is shaping up to be 
a bad day, what with this awareness

of how unaware you’ve become
now seeping into everything.
You stand there over the trash
wondering what else you’ve forgotten,

how far into oblivion you’ve gone
without noticing, how many holes
you don’t even know are there
are waiting to swallow you if you fall.

A number only, 
say the happy-go-lucky.

A milestone, say the ones
who love to make marks.

A privilege, say those
who see how hard it is to reach it.

A failure flag, say those
in love with smaller numbers.

For me, it’s a wall
I never thought I’d have to climb.

Two more digits
in the phone number of farewell.

Another reminder
of what I have and haven’t done.

A mingling of relief and dread.
Another beat on an inexorable drum.

That creaking
is coming from
your childhood, 
a tomb long
left open far behind you
that is now slowly closing
with all your beloved spirits
caught inside. 
From now on 
you are going to have to
move forward
with silence
at your back and
noise ahead
waiting for you
to arrive and make
sense of it without
their voices
to assist you. 
It is as if
they expected you
to have learned
something from all
that whispering,
as if they knew
all along
that childhood
is a tomb and that
its door would close
on them someday,
startling you,
leaving you grieving 
and dimmed
but ready.

My body:

ever-unsleeping
mess of errors and glory; 
my arms slippery from wiping tears;
my legs exposed rebar
in ruined walls.

This body:

physical manifestation of
my urge to look away;
millstone around my proud neck;
refuse, reclamation, refusal.

Any body at all would probably be
a problem for anyone who dwells
as much in their head as I do
but this one, this aged one
I cannot exchange,
this downward slope,
this case study?

I stare into its luminous interior,
a fire consuming me
with minute pains and suspicious
failures too small to treat
and too large to ignore, and say:

fine.  Fine, body:
you are the game piece
I play with and you say
there are rules to be strictly followed now?
Fine, body, fine.

One question though: body,

would it have been different
in any way
if I had been touched
more often
during times when I craved touch
so much I almost wept
without it, or

would it have been different 
in any way
if I had simply loved you more
myself during
those solitary times?

Would we still
be here, burning,
resigned, and 
far too often
awake and aware
of the coming End
in the middle
of the night?

Like a stopped clock,
I’m correct only at intervals.

If I were pressed to say when, I’d say
I stopped at 41 and a few months.

Old enough to claim full rights 
to grown-up, young enough

to pass for less than that
at select moments,

at least in my head.
Now, years later, I’m old enough

to claim old, young enough
to be dismayed that most everyone

agrees with me, not quite old enough
to be past all care for others’ perceptions.

I look forward to one more moment
of complete synchronization

when this stopped clock will one more time
tell it like it is, and then

most likely will be discarded,
or with any luck be shunted into a dusty box

of broken things with sentimental value,
things no one can quite bring themselves to toss.

If this brain softens
any more than it already has
I might have to open my head,
pull it out and lay it out
to dry and re-harden in full sun.

But how to put it back in after
once it’s cooked right?
That’s the kicker.
It would surely take
a shotgun or a hard fall
to get this big bean open
and putting it all back together
and locking it back up after
looks like it would be 
its own special hell.

So maybe
as my brain softens
and it becomes harder for me
to concentrate and recall
and speak, I should just accept

this process as inevitable? I don’t
want to. I’m not ready yet.
Some remaining bit of firmware
locked up in the mush is protesting
on my behalf even as I begin
to sink into that plush forgetting.

Mostly, I don’t want to lose
how I feel when I see 
your face.  

Please — let that
be the last thing to go.  

Let that
remain a diamond till the end.

My body’s been
a good machine

to come this far
with such poor maintenance

Now that it needs a moment
at least or perhaps more

I can’t give it even one second
what with

my mind being 
such a bad driver

How it romanticizes
those shaky wheels

the burping jerk
of the transmission

the rattle portending
something coming loose

in the dark below the hood
or undercarriage

Driving the wheels off
till I settle with a hard thump

into a field somewhere
and disappear

seems to be all that’s left
so onward into the rust

With so much road yet to cover
but so much already passed

I can’t blame my driving mind
for wanting to press on

since it’s been a hell of a ride
and we still haven’t found

a heaven to call home
except for the journey itself

Neither do I young slang,
nor do I game. Not because
I am too old; I just know
and stick to my lane.

It is a path I own.
I will neither rise nor sink
beyond it. In there I still find
all the risk I ever did; more so,

now that I am farther along
than I ever believed I could go.
As though as it becomes
more rugged, more cliff-bound,

more broken, it becomes
more tailored to driving
my current steps and what
I need my stride to be.

As though my scant triumphs,
if you can call fighting
and scrambling for foothold
a series of triumphs,

have more and more to do
with what words I choose to
define, describe, honor 
my progress,

and I have too little time left
to reach back toward youth
and rob their tongues
to pad my own. 

I know my lane. I own 
my road. I do not need
young slang.  I do not 
game. I war. I climb. I am.

To envy the body 
of a younger man,

even if that man is you
some years back
when you still took the words
“pain-free”
as a given
unless you’d just done something
to warrant pain and you knew 
it would pass sooner or later;

to envy such a body as yours
would seem ludicrous,
I am certain,
to those who knew you then
and know you now.

Still you are indeed envious
of that body that did
more or less what was asked of it
with minimal complaint

unlike this one which
burns with urgency
every morning upon waking,
stumbles creaking toward the bathroom,
demands that you put
a steadying hand on the wall
when you step onto a scale
that is barely one inch tall;

unlike this one which, 
when you least expect it,
breaks down at the butcher block,
head down, hands over
its dimming eyes, seeking 
a second of relief, of pretending
that “pain-free” is still possible;

unlike this one
which every day
feels more and more
like a warped 
ancient chariot
rattling around
on broken Roman roads 
with you inside it 
on a headlong rush
to ruin.

To envy yourself as a younger man
back when you felt like a centurion
or at least a foot soldier building an empire
may seem ludicrous to some,

but in the mirror you can still see him,
and you want to reach in 
and shake him and smash him
until he gives you back your temple.

It used to sting my bones
when someone called me “selfish”
for not having had children,
and it has taken me years
to learn how to say
what I have always known.
Now that I am
this far from the beginning
and this close to the end,
I will say it and be at rest.

Wherever you are now,
you who were unborn to me, 
my unknown child or children, 
I say this:

you are blessed,

for our absent, never-was bond
would have been a mistake
made of lightning:
immediate fire consuming all,
echoing ever after.
No one could have survived.  

Be glad forever, wherever you are,
that you are not my children, that I am no
father of yours; that my storms were not yours,
that my slow burn-down was not yours as well;
that whatever tenderness 
we may have felt for each other
was not wasted into ash. Be glad
that while I did not know how
to speak of it,
I understood it well enough
to keep it from happening again.