Once I Could Make Sense

As I lay before you here - gray, thin, bedraggled, sick and weak - Hang on for just a moment!

Just as now I am pausing in my vigorous, full-color life, equally as vibrant as yours is to you

Just as the long-dead doctor who spanked me into life so far in my past was, way back then

Do you try to imagine as he did then, and I did later, that you are me and I am you?

I was a boy who was glad not to have been created as an adult and especially not an old man

This useless and wornout husk you see now, did once actually quiver and overflow with life

Slowly, so slowly, despite all my best efforts and intentions, it must have all come to this

I lay gurgling, learned to crawl, walked, ran, walked again, sat down and now lay here, still

I apologize in advance and thank you so much from the real part of a life to your busy future

I likely don’t have a lot to say right now, but know that once even I could make a little sense

This shrunken and dried chrysalis, from which I am about to emerge, actually served me well

These bent and twisted fingers that can now barely even feed me, could make a daily music

I know not if memories of any of this will remain across the years, to my shrunken perspective

But once a light burned so furious and bright it often brought joyful tears to my eyes

I sat with my elders and later, my loved ones closer than you sit to me now and pondered

Are my eyes empty and blank, drugged or filled with pain, with no trace of this life now?

Once my faculties were sharp and my reflexes quick and I took the measure of this world

Its hard now to believe that I will strive merely not to soil my sheets and can barely sit up to eat

Yes, I knew the impossibility of imagining the weak and withered as the young and strong

But, I swear to you that my own life was no faded photograph, incomparable to your present

The meaning of my time may well be invisible to you and forgotten by me…but here it is real

I may have forgotten running miles, skiing steep slopes and swimming those huge blue swells

So, go ahead and make your pronouncements but simply remember that I made them, too

For all that remains to me is all that will remain to you, far sooner than you can prepare for