Middle Age I have found to be a painful reminder

of melancholy memory. I tell myself that I am not old,

nor scared of what is to come, the hurt of loss, the fragility of kindness,

that I have these greying bags under my blue eyes not because I am tired,

exhausted with continuous running and pulls on my time,

nor wish for a deep dreamless sleep every night

in which nightmares are also kept at bay without the aid

of a chain of garlic slices hung around my fattening neck,

but because the eyeballs

are heavy with optic prompts, eyelids snapped shut mementoes

of everything I have seen, witnessed, taken part in, a photographic journal

in which I need no sharpened pencil or elaborate pheasant’s plucked quill

to capture the mood.

 

 

The eyelids close as Middle Age congratulates me on getting this far.

It smiles broadly as Time is apt to do whilst checking my blood pressure

like a bored Nurse contemplating euthanasia and avoiding small talk in case

the desire to see the needle slip from her hand and into my head

becomes a dangerous reality.

Testing my sanity, my ability to withstand another run around the block,

like I did racing against my cousin in pre-teenage bravado and cock sure attitude,

breathless and with hands placed heavily on hips as we reached the garden gate.

Words of no surrender pausing pregnant like on a parched tongue.

Middle Age desires nothing of note from me

except the ability to continue to worry

over the smallest detail, the lost meaning in a conversation

and to worry about the world you are leaving for others to piss in.

 

 

This is not the flourish of youth, rose tinted cheeks, the hint

of lack of understanding in the eyes, sparkling like the first drop

of pure whisky sipped, drowning out the future, muddling the past.

Nor is it the final chapter of a book in which the hero realises that

everything  they have set out to achieve can be demolished

in a single discarded headline beside an advertisement for retirement cruises

the day after the pause in breath is

stutteringly

Final.

Rather, this is perhaps the between space, Middle Age the great leveller

the cruise round the Universe first class but in a carriage built upon decaying,

woodworm infested timber and with a thousand exploding stars dying

all at once as the double bass player grins in the corner and the violinist plays a jig.

 

 

Middle Age, you come at last, my eye balls are already heavy.

I carry a lot of souvenirs of places I have been within my baby blues,

I have room for more,

If you will do me the pleasure of carrying the spare bags that I have placed upon the floor!

 

Ian D. Hall   2014.