Tobacco Juice (Four Poems on Aging)

Tobacco Juice

Now but a hideous old soiled pearl
Trapped by old age…;
Once beautiful, and vertical,
Now old, with a slightly tilted body…!


#2317 (3-12-2008)


Snapshot of Death

Death we carry like a purring cat,
Old songs and crumbling memories:
Until everything deserts us,
But death!...


#2379 (3-12-2008)


Obstacles of Aging

Ill with diabetes, diminished stamina,
arthritis—never ebbing; a bypass operation:
Now unable to do, this and that (things that
were easy at one time)—:
Now comes the raft, the heartbreak,
the rotating rats: the kids, family,
relatives, all shopping for what they
can dig up, out, before you split, all
obstacles of old age…and once you
split, it starts all over again,
never ending.

#2318 (3-12-2008)





Windy August
(Aging)


He sits alone inside his house, build sometime in the 30s or 40s, he will die there soon, sitting by the kitchen table, looking out the window, waiting for his electric wheelchair to arrive, or perhaps he will die before he gets it (he’s 82). It’s the windy month, of August (so he calls it), his cats keep him company, and he has a few: round and fat are two. He’s got a few paperbacks on the table, he hasn’t read through (from end to end); he mostly sits around the house (pacing), with his robe on in the mornings, walks on his porch near noon, hears the train coming in the back of his house, checks the bushes and flowers along side the porch, the gable over head, is part of his attic, he forgot it was there; two pillars hold the porch in place, the floor is of wood, and steady it is, yet the house is tilted slightly, perhaps the ground is sinking, he thinks. Sprawled out on the floor, is the dog by the TV in the small living room, the fat cats follow him, out the black front door, a cozy little home, not much more: He was once, once upon a time, a pillar among pillars, but not anymore, now he’s a cat feeder, and a paperback book reader, and trapped in old age, like fish on a hook, in the month of August, his last month, the windy one.

Poetic Prose #2319 (3-12-2008)