The Exit of the Aged

As I turn older and fear more than is sensible about pretending the language and the sentiments of youth– given the deep insinuated animus between young and old and the language employed to hasten the exit of the aged — “disgusting, dirty.”

Which I know well as I had such an intimate relationship with young and dying trees and animals on my farm.

The old coon left behind to be torn apart and eaten by the coyotes; the trees, once that small vector for disease is opened so ravaged by rot up and down their heartwood that soon enough they are little more than a carcass.

I know something about dying. In fact, almost went down for the count back in 1969 outside of Chu Lai, Vietnam.

But that was different. I just didn’t give a shit at age 20. Just bobbing down the stream over the precipice…advancing to the end with the line.

In sync with that circadian cycle of ‘’an army upon the land’’…The periodic winnowing, inevitable as the geese flying north in the spring.

That was the time when there were only flashes of any narrative that inspired within the doldrums…”the–oppressive–pick–my–nose–in public…slouchboredoms….sitting on the stoop in the dog days of august…bored to death.” A maze…vertigo…nosebleeds…. love reduced to some cum in my pants.

That slow dawning that we/I would winnow now collectively and individually…In turbulence conceived. Intrauterine darkness…into the violence of the cosmos disappear…so nothing about..’Gentle into that good night’.

Then in neuropsychiatric…. got to see how much I would hang on…. first just drugs and watching the trucks at night cross the Chelsea trestle…then the child’s hatchet hitting at branches amidst the skunk weed in the backyard …and then the dragging of ankle weights across the bottom of the pool.

Simply longing to run…thoughtless, muscle and sinew…my flesh free of thought running primordial, fists pounding, leaping, dick swinging wildly…into rain and wind.

And the fingertips to— the eyes in a shutter instant of God’s creation…the peculiar atonement that was only mine, that soared before the selfsame cripple at eventide. One touch for a lifetime. The drop of blood on her trembling…the lips pink with her blood…all else, save the black wondrous eyes…pale. “Don’t touch me; I will not be able to stop.” The bird’s ribs, the unsuspecting faith…that precursor to mate for a second and die….The passion…O Jesus. Just the 2 hearts splitting…far distant from grunts and coughing up the seeds.

It was an adoration that began to disappear the instant it was handled.

So… that is what OLD yearns for…in the depth of his soul….he yearns to run like the first man ……….through the forests and yet shake in exultation before his selfsame cripple at eventide.

Slowly inexorably  the exultation of  youth running through the forest became hobbled, then exhausted, then finally impossible and the faint glimmer of love through his now hooded and yellowed eyes is refused a priori as foul pathetic by all but maybe one who cannot find what he offers anywhere else and sees past the decrepit to more passion than could exist in her lifetime and kisses him, a heart-stopping elixir, and gives him youth …even as he dies…is torn apart by predators and rotted by virus inside.