That New Year T-Shirt For The Tardy

Because for those of us who are slow 
on the uptake, anything and everything
'is nigh' but it is rare that something happens.
Nick Harper is a musician, here is his website. 

 

The Frustrations Of A Slow Learner

With sex, and 'coming out' to myself,
as with so many other subjects in life,
by the time I coined the questions
that might, if answered them right,
get me slightly ahead in the race
that was going on around me, 
I was too old to have anyone teach me
what I hadn't been taught much earlier.

It took having a life-partner to teach me
who I was and then only in skeletal form
of notes I wrote each in the diary I kept.
And then it was only with reading the diary
a long time after, when the partnership ended,
that I came to see in the shadows of the words
I once wrote in the moment who I actually was.

Now I live alone and see very few people,
I encounter more human life via the media,
and seeing few people comes more naturally
than I wish it did. I can repent of the errors
of my past, that I remember, at my leisure.

Is that what 'retirement' is for ? 

Modern Marriage

Is a see-saw with wheels to give the whole contraption
the impression of it having both speed and direction
when in fact the wheels are stabilizers which root us
 to pasts we have forgotten that we ever knew.