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Results tagged “aging”

I am not the person I imagined.
A silly thought, after countless compromises.
Haven't we all made them, just to live?
But still tragic, for a person dead and never breathed.
The grand fantasies of children, that sense that someday
We still have time to be the whole we dreamed inside.
Is that the line we walk across, between young and old,
Quick and cold, when we stop thinking what we'll be
And wondering where we lost our way?  Backtracking, 
Like age is a map we could retrace.
The poets dying young are fleeing disappointment,
But in what? Their arts, their hearts, or faces?
The fading ambition of youth 
Or the looming inertia of old age?
Forever mourning rosy-colored photos in the past 
While hiding from the ever-changing leaves 
Of tomorrows falling all around.
Are wrinkled forms and wrinkled souls entwined for all,
Mind and body locked and marching on to frailty,
Till every part we call ourselves betrays us?
They told me it crept silently into our faces
In little changes never noticed till too late,
But instead it runs in fits and starts:
My eyes, my mouth, my neck, fingers trembling unasked.
I'm afraid of what comes next.  I could accept
A withered trunk if still my leaves grew green.
But everything and all of me
Fading in a murky bog
Of muddled, mumbling, sentimental Old Woman -
That I can't forgive the threatening tick-tick-tick.
A silly thought - aren't they all silly now?
Pretending that my hopes and dreams are somehow separate
From the worn-down beating of my heart and the sticky blood inside it.
They will all die together, why not tire and slow as one?
And in the end, I probably won't know, forgetting and forgettable.
One day I'll be Her, and that's that, and maybe I won't cry,
The way my mother did last year, remembering, 
The way her mother did, decades past, when I drew her last.
A curse they handed down, unwilling, to their daughters
With all the other mixed gifts of resemblance.
And so the poets stop, right here - maybe even now too late.
But me, I'm nobody, so I keep going: waiting, fearing, hiding
From the fits and starts, come to take the rest away.

I'm an old-timer on the Internet - not so ancient as the Bulletin Board posters of the early 90s, but old enough to remember when AOL was a walled garden and all the links fit on one page. The internet was so big then: full to the brim with tiny sites featuring fun games and comedic rants. For the lonely and isolated (like me), it was a way of reaching out and finding new families - best friends we would never have met, constrained as we were by physical location and social habits. When the late 90s rolled around and commercialism seized the internet, we complained that the fun places were being drowned out by the big brands. You couldn't find Barbie parodies anymore, or teasing twists of trademarked phrases like "Ham, the Other White Meat," because those companies were sending out lawsuits left and right. But then things turned around a bit with blogs and MySpace and the connections people started making in the Oughts. Web 2.0 was all about bringing people together, about making collaborations and virtual families. The internet became a world where we could socialize even better than the local coffee shop.

But I think something's gone very wrong. And - admittedly - this may just be me being old and missing the point, but it seems to me that instead of becoming a place where people who don't fit in can find a niche where they belong, the internet has ballooned into a giant clique where the nonconformists are more scorned and isolated than ever. Blogging is a popularity contest and - for all I love to read Dooce and the like - as a consequence, the less popular are dropping off the map, drowned out and never seen. Instead of connecting by setting up a little home on LiveJournal or Flickr, you just get told every day how incredibly worthless and undeserving of companionship you are, staring at that zero counter month after month.

And the senior clique? They are more confident than ever that they are all the world needs to hear. The way the internet en masse attacks movies like The Crystal Skull, while blithely ignoring the other monumental failures of the genre. The way everyone reads the same books (from Harry Potter to Y: The Last Man). The way everyone knows the same celebrity gossip and CuteOverload vocabulary. You are either in, or you are out (and yes, they all watch Project Runway and blog their reality TV picks with zest).

And I've always been an outsider.

I wander the internet now and it's entertaining enough in a sugary sort of way, like green Jell-o for my morning doldrums. But it's all so same-y and predictable. Occasionally I find a new site that makes me laugh, but it wears off after a few months. I read odd books and wish I had someone to talk to about them. Someone who doesn't like Star Trek or SG-1 or Harry Potter. I wish I had a smaller community of artists where I could feel like I wasn't at the losing end of insignificant.

And I guess that's the real problem there. There are over 6 billion people on the planet, and more of them get on the internet everyday. And - as in real life - there are more desperate-to-fit-in sheep joining up than lonely outsiders. Maybe it was different once, maybe it was smaller and more selective. But it's not. The world's not. And we can't be special anymore. Even the statistical uniqueness of our fingerprints is about to disappear up against that huge number of people. And I don't know how to accept that.

I'm looking at the piece of fairy cake and I just can't grasp how very small I am.

Standing on Trial

Standing on trial, as always, it seems.
Judge my life, since you never let me live it.
That good little girl had scarred wrists.
But this bad little girl won't let you hurt her.

 Don't you dare
 Point out all my mistakes done.
 Don't you dare
 Tell me that I was the wrong one.

Raised to be nothing more than a quiet slave.
Crush my talents, steal my self-confidence.
Fill the holes in my head with pretty lies.
Fill the holes in my heart with endless guilt.

 Don't you dare
 Treat my tears with a laugh.
 Don't you dare
 Try to tell me the right path.

I was more than you ever imagined.
I was better than you ever wanted to be.
I was strong enough to finally escape you.
I was the evil I had to be free.

 Don't you dare
 Tell me what I should be.
 Don't you dare
 Be disappointed in me.

 You gave me nothing,
 You took everything,
 You crippled me
 And told me to love you.

 Don't you dare
 Pretend you cared.
 Don't you dare
 Pray for me.

Old Friend

I grew up in darkness and in grief
Daily struggling, just to keep afloat
Your calm demeanor mocked by contrast
My flailing efforts to survive.
But in the end I reached a patch of solid ground.
I stood,
And looking back, 
Found you instead had drowned.

Age

Day after day I catch her tears
While she tries to break my heart
Instead of throwing balls we're throwing knives
And icy glances of burning hate
Little children seem to play so soft
So how did our hearts become so hard?
Nothing's a game in this older world
And no one kisses the hurt away.

She says she's forgotten how to smile
And I can't remember how to love
The shrieking laughter that was our language
Is now a moan caught deep inside
And the pain when I open my eyes
Only ends when I close my mind
Behind these walls we're starved from life
And pale under the summer sun.

Nature was cruel to age us so
and then leave us all the memories
Facing backwards we stumble on
I guess it's no wonder that we fall. 

Jeckel & Hyde

I've seen that look in my father's eyes,
A man staring down the caged tiger:
his fear hidden behind his back,
behind a whip,
behind a curse.
All for a fragile child with wide grey eyes.
She doesn't understand
What I've come to understand.

All those years of meak surrender,
All those nights alone,
My dark history didn't make me
an outsider.
a demon whore.
This fury was born to my first breath.
And the whole world saw it, 
When it was hidden to me.

Calm covers chaos, 
sun before storm.
The good girl I was
Could never endure.

Shadow takes light,
Tide coming in.
Transforming from quiet
To a deep scream within.

One girl becomes the monster.

The petty minions of society,
They know the stranger's step,
Past word or dress or politics:
a hidden brand,
a dark aura.
Their whispered hostility dogs my path.
For a part of me I can't conceal,
Something I can never change.

I can't cry for what I've lost
For all those lives that were never mine.
I can never feel insignificant,
never common,
never normal.
I must accept the virtues others despise.
I must press on without regret,
Running toward my own dark end.

Mother is a bad word

Mother tucks me into bed.
A little kiss for the baby no one wanted.
Mother sings a goodnight song.
Hush, hush, my little baby I never wanted.

What was Mother before me?
I wonder, did you ever have a life to lose?
Or did you simply drift along
Hands stretched to catch each passing dream.

Father hurts and Father yells.
A little kick for the baby no one wanted.
Father screams at Mother Dear.
Hush, hush, says the baby, not what I wanted.

Love me, Mother says each night.
Gazing down at me with a desperate smile.
But did you ever love me first?
Or was I just another doll to that little girl?

Who do I hate more?
Father who hit and hated that little baby?
Or Mother Dearest,
Who never protected her own little baby.
Who never wanted her own little baby.
Who never wanted me.
Who never wanted anything.

copyright 1993-2008 mleiv, any reproduction or distribution expressly prohibited