What you used to tell yourself
was no more than a quirk 
or a tic to be borne
with dignity

in spite of the shame
it engendered
regardless of whatever play
you were in

is now a wide tear
in the backdrop 
wherever you go
whatever you do

The nasty old brick wall behind it
with years of grafitti
about you and your shame 
can be seen from any angle 

and it’s time to decide
if you are going to brazen it out
then bow to the awful reviews
or go on pretending no one can see

by reminding yourself
they keep coming to the show
The whole run is sold out and
There’s no one who can take your place

One gesture after another
toward your grandiose legacy
Drawing attention to the fact
that the crowd is thinning and 

it’s not like it used to be 
out here on the boards
They’re whispering as they filter out
to the street and leave you behind

where we once kept our hope
for the obvious to happen
a place of longing sometimes fulfilled
more often disappointed
revised into lies

where we tried to hide empties
when blue lights came flashing
under mounds of fast food bags
old T-shirts almost gone to rags
a towel or two or more

where we now keep no deep nostalgia or regret
for what we lost or did not lose
back there behind the driver’s seat
where today there are groceries or kids
or rideshare customers for the critical second job

of all the things we put on the back seat
when we were too young
to put them anywhere else 
the only thing we long to hold again
is the idea that anything can happen there

as we travel
mundane routes
to and from 
mundane places 
which when we were young

were still years or decades away 
we try to hold to the idea
that possibility is behind us
but still within reach
with only a bit of a stretch

Faces as fresh as memories of
a mistake made in front of a crowd.

Grip as firm as the pommel
on a saddle or a sword.

A smile fast as a bleeding heart
tumbles to the floor.

Friendly — what’s friendly?
Do we embrace now,

punch each other’s shoulders?
What do we do now, old buddy?

We’ve not seen each other
since high school, or a year or two later

at Billy’s Pub, or the Station Tavern;
who knows, some other local bar. Are we still

drunk on that old beer?  Are we still 
afraid to admit our entire relationship

was alphabetical, based on twelve years’
of classroom seating charts? That we

don’t know each other, really?
That we never did?

Let it be shoulders then. Then let us turn, 
in pain, separately back to the bar.

The pine we used to use
for second base in the vacant lot
across the street from where I was raised

is long gone, the lot having been
transformed back then 
by a split level

that was new, then decayed,
now refurbished to 
the beauty it originally displayed,

which for me is none.
I still resent how
the builders took that tree down

before I developed
enough strength and courage
to get farther than the first branch.

All that’s left: the unclimbable
third base birches, looking 
not a day older than they did

fifty years ago; those bent trees and 
my anger that somehow
whenever I come back

this is the first thing and nearly
the only thing I recall
about a place I once called home.

So little new 
to say
once you realize
that you have stopped
being a person and
transformed into
a footpath
now that you have
reached a certain age,
that people
either follow you
or wear you out
or stray from you;

you are so carved
into your surroundings
that you cannot help 
but stay in your groove, 
ground into the landscape
until the last person
who remembers you 
as a person has passed,
and that will be all,

but still you keep
doing this Work

because there’s always a chance 
of you becoming one path
to that which is still out there,
beyond your view, a destination
everlasting and pure enough
that even if no one ever
says your name again 
you will have helped,
you will have mattered.

Why I am unimaginable
these days —

appearing whole to myself in no mirrors,
neither literal nor figurative;

merely an apparition when in person,
an uncertain wisp to some, dismissed

entirely by others.
All I can think of, really,

is the discomfort I feel
in various parts of the body,

the structure I used to feel
was a grand little house.

The creaking these days
from the corners and the eaves

drowns out any clear being
in the decay. Somehow I’m still here

but undiscoverable right now.
Disintegration; not showing as whole.

I’ve been the birch, the
definition of bent. Look me
up and see how weight 
falls from me. It is 
how I’ve been able to hold
myself as lovely despite
my pock-scarred
inconvenient bark. Pure
arc, an icon of resilience
when seen from afar.

I’ve been the oak, 
stubborn unhollowed
pillar. Despite the rain
of acorns denting what’s below,
seen as somehow
admirable for my strength
until I fall and crush others,
or until someone else
falls and is broken
while trying to pass
over what I have left behind
year after year. 

I should have been
sawgrass or perhaps
wild oats, a purslane
closer to the soil. Some
weed I cannot name now,
less obvious, more or less
scarce or extinct. I still
would have been more alive
in your imagination, but 
fixed and unavailable to be
downgraded. Less metaphor
than good memory. Beloved
in a static way.

Look, friends:
I’ll be dead
sooner, not later.
Will never make it to
one hundred twenty two; 
stop calling this
“middle age.”

These are 
gateway days, friends;
I’m at peace, why aren’t
you? I am upright under
a lovely arch twined
with vines and blooms.

When I look back into the 
long valley I’ve come from
I see a view I can
adore; when I look up
to the Divide above me
what I see is glorious with 
the rays of the same sunrise
I came from, as it barely feels
like it’s been a day
since I was born. I still feel 
new, but know I’m not; friends,
is that not perfection?

Little Kitty
eats almost all
of Big Kitty’s food
before I have a chance 
to fill and put down her own plate
which I always do first
and not with my back turned 
to the two of them
except for this morning 
when I forgot. 

Big Kitty 
sits there staring at me
while the piracy
is taking place. 

I always cringe
when my soft brain fails me,
ashamed of what I see as
my cruelty,
intended or not.

“I’m sorry, so sorry,”
I say as I put Little Kitty’s
plate full of her preferred
mush before Big Kitty,
which she tucks into
as if nothing much
has happened.

I feel
more upset than is warranted,
I guess. My forgetfulness, 
more and more common these days,
leads to these small harms
no one much cares about,
but I gather them and 
hoard them in secret places
until I am rich with self-blame.

The cats make do.
I make mistakes, then coffee.

Mistakes
before coffee,

no one as bothered
by my failures as I am,

and me piling up words
about all of it:

a pirate stealing meaning
from a sinking ship.

When I was young, ascending,
high on this Work,
I believed I would one day
be old and still flying. 

This deep into
my aging, though,
I am dismayed
and earthbound,

tethered to the heavy stone
of Work Already Done
because living’s become a windstorm
and I am lightweight and weak.

Here I am full of folly,
thinking the Work So Far
no doubt will save me; 
robbed of the foresight to see the paradox:

how much
still within me
could die with me
if I do not let go.

Something new in the Work
is screaming for birth,
but I dare not let it out.
I do not know how

to let it break it free
of my decay
without dying myself
when it escapes.

Then again, maybe
the moment of my death,
when the Work bursts free
of my shell-shocked, brittle frame,

will be the first moment
the Work will exist on its own.
Isn’t that enough,
you ask?

I whisper,“no, it is not,”
but if I have this right,
no one will hear that over 
the roar of the Work’s ascent.