I had several people direct message me about yesterday’s post, saying (a) it was late; and (b) that I’m wrong in asserting that there is no secret to eternal youth, because there is. After reading and considering all of their carefully reasoned arguments, I can only respond with

… sorry it was late.

in dreams the roads are longer 
and night and day are one 
we rustle then like leaves across 
some distant overrun 

where sound turns into silence 
and silence into haze 
in dreams the roads seem endless 
just like these 

latter days

I love sleeping, but I’m not that fond of dreaming. Dreams are unreliable friends; they bring up subjects we’d rather they didn’t, stay too long, and come back at the worst possible times.

Sleep is like getting a massage; dreams are like someone operating a jackhammer just outside your door.

come ride the hillside of barely knowing, 
come slide along on the nescience; 
all is so free where the winds are blowing 
random accessible ignorance. 

come see vapors that turn to shadows 
that we can claim to mean "it's our turn" -- 
come ride the hillside of barely knowing, 
where we can find, but can never 

learn

One of the best things about writing poetry is that it doesn’t really have to make sense, at least not in the same way sentences are supposed to. Last time I checked, emotions don’t really make any sense, either; ideally, poetry conveys those nonsensical (or irrational) emotions. It can, of course, do a million other things; and people will have their preferences as to what they like in poetry.

Sometimes, it helps to read online prose discourse as though it were poetry. When you stop trying to make sense of the welter of human emotions, it can make life a lot easier.

And then one can produce their own posts on time. So sorry about yesterday.

Years go by, 
And words entwine: 
So we must accept 
Our own 

Decline

Acceptance of the limitations that come with aging is not a particularly easy skill to master; however, life tends to leave us with few other choices. One of those few is “raging and storming”, which, while entertaining, has limited value in actually changing anything.

I myself prefer “bitching and moaning”, which is equally useless.

Now we humans love secrets, and we seek them everywhere. Many of us think there is a secret to never getting old, never being in decline, never having to deal with new limitations. And we look for the secret. And we spend hours of time and as much money as we can muster chasing the secret. Which turns out to be a chimera.

chi·me·ra

/kīˈmirə,kəˈmirə/

noun

… a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.

From the Oxford Dictionary

Chasing after impossible to achieve things is a bit of a hobby with me. And I hear it is good to have hobbies as you age. So learning to accept aging by refusing to accept aging seems to be my current path.

Sigh.

Well, it isn’t the last self-contradictory cycle I’ll find myself in, I’m sure.

in memory, you're still alive, 
 and I'm still young, and we're still free; 
 in recollections deep and high, 
 there's still a you to be with me 

along the shore, beside the sea, 
 it's not a veil, it's verity -- 
 there's summer actuality, 
 in memory, in memory

The photo affixed to the top of this post is upside down. It gives it an odd, unsettling quality, I think.

It took me a minute to figure out what was wrong with it. I flipped the photo, and it suddenly just looks like an ordinary photo. But I show it here the way the photographer intended.

Much of what we present to the world or are presented with, daily, is upside down. We may realize that something seems off with it, but can’t put our finger on what it is.

I think this sort of “upside-downness” characterizes most of my own memories. That’s because a bare recording of the facts or events changes almost completely when perspective is skewed, and mine pretty much always was, and is.

I realize, looking back, that my ability to understand why other people behaved as they did was severely limited at the time, and is scarcely better now. I might think today, that my parents did things with us like take us to the beach because they loved us. At the time, I just thought, “well, this is a things that’s happening” — if I thought anything at all.

The fact that memories are upside down doesn’t make them inaccurate. It just means others need to take care in using them, because they may not be what they appear at first.

ever the always/sometimes wonder, 
heart in the throat, and cash in hand; 
promises made, then torn asunder, 
faces and bodies barely scanned, 

heritage, legacy in forfeit -- 
choices unmade like a hotel bed -- 
ever the always/sometimes hollow, 
life for the living; death, the dead.

Lives are easier to break than they are to build. Every gift in life can be a curse: every boon, a myriad of opportunities for failure. He had made money, then the money unmade him.

Nothing seems more real in life than the desires of the moment; nothing brings consequences quite so real, either.

Now, many people I know struggle with a form of the belief that modern life itself is not real: the imagery is fake; our relationships are fake; the promises of politicians and businesses are fake. Most of us having spent two years recently locked inside with nothing but the internet didn’t help those types of feelings.

But for him, living out of a hotel and having lost his job, his marriage, and with kids he never sees, life seems only too real. It is hard for him to believe he gave all of that up for things so empty and fleeting.

From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.

The feeling never really goes away.

A busy, distracted life has its advantages. When you wake up with a list of things to do in your head, and go through the day right up until bedtime with always the “next thing” top of mind, the feeling sits off to the side patiently, like a lonely customer at a busy restaurant waiting for a table.

Eventually, that customer’s time comes, and you find yourself seated with the feeling that you are always trying to avoid.

The feeling doesn’t really have a name. It is wide and dark, like November, it is tall and cold, like an iron gate in the snow. It feels like 3AM when you can’t sleep, like being in a waiting room at a hospital. It is a feeling that defies classification, defies identification, and only allows itself to be felt, not verbalized.

The sorrows we carry are bigger than we are, yet somehow exist inside us, carrying with us the broken bits of what we used to be — of what we can no longer be.

And we sit, staring at a feeling whose name we do not know, but who knows ours only too well.

awash out on the lonely yard a gaze -- 
november haze and ice and hidden rue; 
to do another thing is meritless, 
and spiritless, a shadow made of doubt 

we do not think so much as feign we think, 
and drink from sorrow's glass, and sink within 
the din from our past lives, in endless loop, 
a group of imaged truths, no longer 

true