Oldage Oldage

Has your fever finally hung you out to age?
Cold in the culture of a one bedroom apartment.
Your grey hairs laughing at the ones you took to bleach.
Gloved,
Creating parts between your scalp and yourself.

Today, I lost a scar.
It fell like feather from the shadow of my breast
To the floor with its lock of most irreversible tissue.
Healed to a seal in the ides of my manhunt.
Proving barbed wire does not touch the flesh,
It puts its rust to blood.
Like a child is put to day from the red and warm water of womb
In to the failing disposition of your kicked-in skin.
In to the world and its manifold instruments of telling health
From the drone of spending flesh to losing minds and wound-down hearts
All seeing a persistence of the flesh
Against what clocks clean might sink.

He is pre-deceased.
He is survived by his wife.
He is doing dead leaf angels
Autumn-hearted and un-young still.
There is green on his grave.

Death is a most acquired taste.
Just as one's corpse is not fearsome.
These are the grueling but certain results of all birth.
The all-sprawling, nothing-much of your skull amongst the stars.
And hydrogen.
Big, motherfucking hydrogen.
More meaningful than bacteria
Is the teeming of your once-through of the flesh.

Old age is invincible.
Perfect,
And most purposeful.
It is the call of the child to the helm of mind for sinking
As carried off by the whites of memory.
Away from a single changing of the teeth
Toward a slow exchange of fat cells with the death in front of them.

It's the sophistication of the flesh
Thinning to your frame,
Adhesed over veins,
Darkened by the suck decades of nothing but pumping.

Will you die a slightly used death?
Skin slackened with work
At the elbows and throat.
A hard angel
So both infant and skeleton.

Old age is a form.
Soon, you will be wormed out.
A simpler thing
Of compounds
And languagelessness.