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.

Scrolling from cute dog pics
to Sandra Bland
to Donald Trump
to Pluto portraits
to recipes
to horrible jokes
to music videos
to requests for crowdfunding
to the next thing
and the next thing
and the next.

The world
an unending demand for action.
The action
a drop in the stormy blood ocean.

See myself in the dust swirling in the room where I sit and stare and stare and stare.

To rub my eyes and feel helpless.
To lose my shit.
To lose. 
To fail my friends and loved ones.
To fail as a person entirely.

To age into my own obsolescence.

I only forget the things that are important.
Everything else?
Lint all over everything.
Spots before my eyes so thick
they catch my tears.  

They swell to pillows.
They swell to smother.
They swell as I shrink.

I’m a beyond hope.
A dead letter.
A smidgen asked to tower.
I have no shadow left to throw.

I don’t have an answer
to anything anymore,
not one.  

I can’t remember anything
new.  I can’t remember
what just happened,
though I know 
I once knew that.

I alternate between
ever refreshed rage
at the injustice
of each lost moment
and pained memories of 
what once was,
so far long gone ago,
or so I’m told.

My one present pleasure’s
the garden —

the scent of the tomato plants
when I’m weeding in close
to their thorn-fuzzed stems. The dill
on my hands, the rosemary
in my skin.  How I fret over 
when things will sprout,
grow, bloom, fruit! I participate
in the old this way
while being aware 
that there is a future
inherent in this work.
Gardening tells me
there can be happiness
even now, even as
all else
is slipping off
and falling away.

New poem.

inside this 
clothing
an average wrapper of
slightly sagging skin upon
an average man
who’s been eaten smaller
by his age

he undresses himself
before sleep

stands in front of
a former enemy
a mirror

sees
wisdom about
and love for
himself
revealed in how
his folded hands rest
upon his loose husk
of a belly

those things
were once
so hard
to see

now they stand out
against approaching
Dark

and offer him
surprising comfort
before Sleep

New poem.  

This waning,
this decay,
this slowdown — 

this is
my body.  This

stubborn
raw stone in a shoe, this
broken heel, this bad toenail,
this slash in a sole.  This is

my body: what I own,
all I own.  Don’t 

care much for it; free it
to care for itself or not,
let it feed
on what’s at hand. This old

pirate stealing my speed.
This old eyelid in full drop,
this old endgame wondering

if tonight tomorrow or next after that
will bring an end — well, well.

I say: let it. Let me
slow down to crawl,
then to belly skid,

then to full stop —

I will still be as beautiful then 
when I am in those first moments
after I die and my body — this
hesitancy, this now permanent delay — 
lies absolutely still.  I will surprise you

with that sudden marble intensity after a life
of frenzy, with my meditation
on how not to move.

This is my body
now, soon to be no longer mine.
When I’m gone you’ll speak of 
what was left behind:
you’ll speak of
a rot-fallen willow.

Not I.  
If something of me can still speak 
it will sing of this body
and of how it was
imperfect, but was never

a mistake.

Currently I am in transition

from easily visible, solid, and present
to softly hazed and hard to see.
You offer sympathy?
I turn it gently aside.
Nothing painful to this.
I am, rightly or not,
beginning to fade from view,
preparing to sleep through
a slow apocalypse.  

The sequence of expected events
is not important.  
How my time will slide out from under me
is not important.
I am in this moment, called now.
I remember my history, called then.
I don’t own either of them.
None of us
own any of it
and none of us
will decide what happens after us
and most of us
are going to be forgotten
in the moment
we’re done.

Currently I am in transition 

toward sleeping through
the rest of our slow apocalypse.
All the signs point to it
from the hot wind and the scarce bees
to the gray water in the Arctic and
the permafrost relinquishing its hold.

When it comes, that ending,
that curtain,
when it comes
it will come in obliquely.

It will not be swift.
It will take a long time to happen.
It has taken a long time already.
It is taking its time with us.

When it comes, that disaster,
that shaking off,
when it comes
I will be asleep
and I pray
I will not be dreaming.

Currently I am in transition

already asleep and waiting
in the now that will erase the then
eventually.  I am fading from view
and being forgotten.  

I am 
the harbinger of the slow apocalypse.
Perhaps
I am a whore or a broken seal
but I am
no horseman riding frantically,
no multi-headed beast,
certainly not a soldier in any army
evil or righteous.

If you want to know
how it will be,
see this body bloated and sluggish
and this mind resigning position after 
position. See how hard it is
to lay your finger on me.

Currently I am in transition.
I think, now, you might know what I mean.
If you want to, if you feel it,
go ahead and scream your eyes out.
I did that too, a while ago.
I got over it.
I will be here when you are done. 
Currently I am in transition
but I will wait for you.

For today’s users
what is old means nothing
if it’s not remixed —

They pick the bones
confidently salvaging whatever they can
even if it was not what was intended —

The old context
that’s now a rag of skin
around the skeletal neck —

All that’s left is for it
to be torn free
from what still matters —

those shiny bones
that clatter so beautifully
though they used to sing —

No remark upon sadness
or mutilation even if it is an improvement
can be tolerated —

context and the past
will just drag the bones down
into filthy graves —

I am unopposed to progress
Slew my own old dragons in my day
Still do my fair share of junking through them —

but cannot help thinking
of how they once roared
and burned —

were they not
the most lovely horrors
without my meddling —

Perhaps now
it is close to my turn
for the scrapheap —

this must be why I understand
such fires as theirs
and how they turned them against us

The noise passed.
We were left behind.

We were lonely at first.
We became accustomed to it.

The noise had been young,
made of all the things of youth:

insistence, shouting, imploring.
We’d gotten over these.  We’d

changed, or the noise had become
anathema, or the shouters had

decided against us.  (That last one hurt
as certainly as abandonment always does.)

But we moved on by standing our ground.
We didn’t stop what were doing: noticing,

affirming, finally growing moss, attending to
the deeply worn grooves and paths

that the noise had used to pass us by
and then left behind.  Look,

we whispered to no one, here’s a stone
I’ve never seen, here’s a new flower.

It was quiet when we said these things.
We could hear first ourselves, then each other.

Now, the noise has become
distant.  We sometimes hear single words

rise above that faraway clamor:
“elders,”  “honor,”  “legendary;”  

words for someone else
to ponder and debate,

as we have our work to do and fierce,
stubborn love for this new quiet we do it in.