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

Their Times Have Passed Me By

Time has passed me by

And I cannot really say that I was sorry to see it go

Time has passed right on by me

But I have been OK with missing out on all the latest fads

I think that maybe now I am slowly walking down a country lane

Instead of being stuck in traffic on a smoggy super highway

I even sat quietly in the shade for a dozing interval

and thought for just a moment that I might not be losing any time

It took a while but the times have passed on by me

now their confused dust is disappearing beyond my event horizon

I’m not in tune with the early adapters

I wear and repair a lot of stuff that’s secondhand

I’m not buying new cars, fast food, colas, snacks or taking out any loans

The advertising target on my back has pretty much worn right off

The beautiful people cannot even see me behind their expensive sunglasses

Movers and shakers in a hurry easily look right on through me

I listened to the birds and not the markets just the other morning

Haven’t had that tiny and insulting 1.5% salary adjustment for several years now

I’m daydreaming on the sidelines with my helmet off as the clock runs down

Not anxiously awaiting another dream vacation I cannot afford and will not remember

Content to be cut off in the slow lane and watch the power drivers roar on by

Not quite so sure the future is still brighter than the past that I came from

Cast ashore for good by social waves as their dirty, teeming river hurries by

Not picking up the kids or meeting some prospect for an expensive power lunch

My rapid advance towards as yet unconsidered goals has slowed down to a crawl

Now as I regurgitate their sound bites, people say I sound a bit sarcastic

To the masters of the universe, I’m a useless deadbeat who pays his credit card on time

Caught up in the gears of progress I feel lucky to have been spit out while still alive

So now, somehow, I’ve eddied out for a moment just as I approach that unavoidable abyss

Thank god they spun me off and passed me by for this brief instant before our eternal nothing