Signs Of Greater Age (44)

You go to the supermarket less often 
than you used to: diminished taste buds
eating alone so much of the time,
and a shrinking appetite lengthen
the times between each visit you make.

And when you go your knees and hips
don't work as smoothly as they used to.
For what you want to buy you don't need
a trolley but where you have a handle
to grip and press down on, holding it
is more of a comfort than you at first realise.

The last time I was in the queue to pay for my food
the retired woman in front of me told me about
what a friend of hers saw last week: Her friend
saw man die whilst in a queue almost in front of her.

I had to ask the lady in front of me
'Did he choose the wrong checkout?' 

'Lord Give Me Chastity, But Not Yet.....'*

As an occasional pursuer of porn
and a serial reader of detective fiction
of the type where it's selling point
is how much it lacks elegance
I was recently surprised when I realised
how alike these two interests I had were.

Both cut to the chase with indecent haste,
both make a lack character development
their chief virtue and both keep you seeking
by never giving their pursuer/reader
what they actually want; a truly satisfying ending.

*the youthful prayer of St Augustine of Hippo
as recalled in his forties in his 'Confessions',
written circa 400 A.D. in Latin. It is a book
that I read all the way through, once. But,
like the works of Kierkegaard, it is a book
that I would now find had too many words in it
and its ideas are presented in the wrong order
-but then again what is modern man meant to do
with history, beyond argue against it? That is
what St Augustine and Kierkegaard did.....

Precious Memories

Vices are like genitals;
with age other peoples bits
get less attractive

And yet our own remain
most precious to us,
if only for the memory
of how they once acted.  

 

Another Country

Nostalgia is the Stockholm Syndrome
for the elderly and infirm
that locks them into the past
and out of the present.

There fading memories combine
with faint hopes in the present
which together lead
to the place of no return.    

Signs Of Greater Age (25)

1-Needing help from your partner
to wrestle duvets into their covers,
far more often than there is
any mutual wrestling with lust.

2-Finding high finance to be the new rock 'n' roll:
Where once you were excited by the charts
and which musical rebel could sell the most
whist remaining rebellious, maturity produces
an affection for news and speech based radio.
Every day it gives a financial weather report
on rises and falls in the stock exchange
with an earnestness that suggests it really matters.

Signs Of Greater Age (19)

Finding true comfort in detective fiction,

1-because the portrayal of the intial
absence of facts echoes how you feel
about yourself-where did my life go?

2-Repetition redefines the comfort,
because for all that the characters
are thinly written, they each have
a beginning, and their progress
is  plotted until they get to the end.

However cardboard the characters seem
their predestination is more cohesive than real life.

Signs Of Greater Age(2)

1-finding the courtesy and
engagement of public library
staff a cause for a greater
gratitude than previous.

2-naturally disengaging
from films where the actors
are promoted as stars,
fit for media gossip, because
they are under thirty five.

3-finding the fake tension
of detective fiction more
entertaining and enlightening
than what are presented
as real life moral dilemmas.