He quips: beer is a wonderful preservative
Knowing the latest bands and downloading
Music and movies and owning an iPod
Are "all like really cool..."
But sometimes, just sometimes
He catches himself in the mirror
And thinks: Jesus Fucking Christ -
I'm wearing Kmart flannelette shirts
Slippers and a dressing gown
Just like my long dead grandpa
Who was never cool and didn't pretend
Have I slipped out of an ironic hipness
And into a droll self-referentialism?
Am I becoming the sort of person
Who at parties and family gatherings
Would always bore me to tears?
What happened to my sense of style,
My flat abdomen, my good vision?
Is this what it means to get old -
Parts of us falling away as if we had
Some sort of temporal leprosy?
If so, then Time is a war crime
And should be tried in the Hague
Sentenced to Eternity with itself
And none of this using death as a proxy
Ultimately it is all part
Of some irrefutable process
Which none of us truly understands
We just get older, folding in on ourselves
Another night in front of the fire
With enough alcohol to assuage regret
To be young is to avoid remembering
To be old is to be unable to forget
© shaun patrick green 2013
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