Overweight,
slightly
bursting apart at the seams,
though once as slim
as an overworked rake,
and slender enough to be lean
and hungry.
Still got hair,
lots of it cascading down my back,
though thin from being dyed
since I was seventeen,
going grey early, a subsequence
of the disease remaining undiagnosed,
refusing to have it cut,
I never liked short hair on myself,
I always looked like a thug
when I looked in the mirror
that hung askew in the draught-filled hall.
My eyebrows have thinned out
and unless I trim them I somehow
start to resemble Leonid Brezhnev
when he was transforming into
Michael Landon, all wiry and uplifting.
The beard should have been grown
so much younger, it should have been
sitting on a face that thankfully
has refused to join my stomach in
becoming a façade of its former self,
no double chin to be pronounced,
however by keeping off the beard till
I was less of a child, I was still able to
attend Rocky Horror nights
without looking odder than I already am.
The self portrait
doesn’t go as far to show the full effect,
the canvas, not as deep
to show the inner feelings,
a complex man I hope, a good man I trust,
the forty years a blue unseen these days,
the allusion to being a writer,
one of three things I wanted to be
as a teenager,
thankfully bypassing the first mechanic
on the moon idea I had as a child,
not knowing about how the engine works
a major setback in such things,
yet I have no type-writer on my desk,
no nervously half-smoked cigarette clogging
up the lungs,
no splutter of near digested smouldering flame
as I search franticly for a rhyming scheme
I never cared for.
The library in which the portrait is painted,
is perhaps the greatest achievement,
although a great deal
of my books
have also migrated to the bedroom,
the beauty of the past driven sonnet
always the best and frequently read
text book.
The written portrait shows no signs
of the pain in the legs, where the Osteoporosis,
the feminine allusion inherited
down the line, the stark starving mad
smashes of baseball bats bouncing
up and down off my spine,
which adds to the ever increasing insanity,
tempered by words, tempered by thoughts
of a good person,
of the broken shoulder that refused to
truly heal,
of the scars, appendix leaking acid,
the knife through my hand
in stopping a violent man from hitting his
girlfriend, from adding weight to her face,
upon my arms where self harm
was better than her harming me…
The portrait of a middle-aged man
requires more than a canvas
or camera can capture this ragged old man
but the love I have for you is all
that is truly needed to be seen
out of the deep blue something eyes,
still my very best feature.
Ian D. Hall 2015