Thursday, January 12, 2012

Uplifting poem of the century

Slow

Incremental steps
No, a shuffle of monu-millimetre proportions
I inch closer to the sunken compost heap, or kiln
I haven’t decided

Either way, decided or not
The skin slackens
The gut bloats
The hair recedes
Dreams of grandeur fade in the distance of my outgoing tide
Another grain of sand slips through the cracks onto an alarmingly large pile

28 years old
Roughly a third of the way
What do I have to show for it?

I have my words
I guess
But even they slip away, I increasingly find myself face first in a dictionary
Or
Staring into the unrecognisable distance of sentences
Making faces of vegetables
Or the serious frown of an infant as it thinks about shitting itself
Not to mention the drawn out ummms of Alzheimer’s as I struggle to find the names for things

Along with these words I will abandon myself
Like the wedding ring that sits on a plump brides finger

Slowly
Almost not at all
It slips down
One day at a time
Harmless?

Perhaps

A sacred symbol of a dead love finds itself loosely hanging
Slack on a spindly, splinter of bone
It once was a finger
Warm, plump and owned

Be it worm food
Or pot ash
Decided or not
We will all go down with our once mighty ships of sinew

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