Is this what I have to look forward to?
Sick friends dissolving in their wretchedness
In beds, in lusts, sad vanity, a slew
Of bodies slew, unslaked, without redress,
In various states of undress? You pined
Not former times but how the muscle flexed
Beneath the sleeve, hidden, well-defined,
Sweet but prurient eye entranced and vexed
By what you’d lost. Perhaps you would object,
You still had strength to pull the ones you’d press,
Bone thin, to your chest. I might interject
“An itch to steal or otherwise possess”
Might be a fix you still had yet to fix.
You’re fixed. I’m not. Or maybe not just yet.
There’s still time for guitar, to learn the licks,
To finger frets. I’ve earned my licks, regret
Nothing. I still can bench with no debenture,
No aching joints tomorrow. I’ll bear the lactic
Fires and iron weights. But the next adventure
Here after youth, when ambition’s galactic
Ambit constricts, a singularity
From which light can’t escape? What’s left to do?
Who’s left? With an old man’s precarity
And empty hunger I could hobble through
My job until I have a stroke and move
In paralyzed circles that ever tighten
To a lightless point. We don’t have to prove
Ourselves, do we? I thought you were a titan,
But I guess even Hyperion shined
Until Apollo showed him up and snuffed
That trembling light. I wonder, did you find
Your former glory or were you rebuffed
Standing, you thought, near heaven at those heights?
Did you wonder where last years’ snows had gone?
After all you’d suffered, all of life’s slights,
You still filched some pleasure. Francois Villon,
The thief, knew how to steal away from grief,
From pens and daggers, in wordless exile.
The start of eternity is a brief,
