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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.