An autobiographical patch

A Lasting Patch on Tapestry of Life

I started to age when I was fifty nine. It was not sudden, but the process was quick to affect me physically, emotionally and intellectually. In negation of all the literature on the subject, the highest IQ score I got was at that age. My IQ started moving fast downhill, gaining potential energy which it would never have a chance to use since I also started abhorring uphill climbs, during that time. I may also have lost the possibility to apply to one of the high IQ societies whose membership either spend their time patting each other on the back, (a commendable pastime) or brewing up conspiracies to bring religion, nationalism and or dictatorships back for deserving countries, (not so commendable but with some merit also, depending on one's beliefs and status.)

My last uphill climb of seventy eight steps was two weeks before I was diagnosed with two blocked arteries. Between the two events, I flew to Trieste for a board meeting where I had to tread the endless appearing corridors of the old head office of the parent company. One would have thought that, having survived the ordeal of seventy eight steps at a rocky seaside resort in Southern Turkey, I would prance through the dim corridors. But, alas, each step gave me a pain in the midriff, which I associated with reflux, gastritis, blocked intestines, Italian natural gas or maybe even a cancer of sorts. The shortness of breath I was feeling was attributed to my weight and smoking, or just the heat. It was June 2004, a monkey year for a monkey man.

There are those who boast of my friendship and others with genetic ties who may say that my aging actually started when I broke all the ligaments on my left knee while watching a group of small kids swoop through a wooded path, climbing to the steep snow bank on one side and not being able to control the right ski from sliding and the left one abandoning my size eleven feet. However, that is pure hindsight like "The Black Swan Theory."

LAST DAYS

Bottled Up

last days are just that
although i can hear you say, "what?
that's not gamesmanship at all!"
"this writer does not see the court and the ball."

yet, for the poet, it is the play
the play by play, which may
stop only when the clock winds down
and the sand, its last particle has flown

into a bottle with a waist so narrow
goes the sand and the debris it can borrow
to stretch the instance, believing it may be elastic
becoming as time goes, more and more caustic

then one not so dreary day
like many other one meets, on the way
the bottle to one side flops or is turned
with the sand defiled and churned

Even if there was a witness
to say, "there is still more sand your highness!"
to flow down, and some detritus
but the time keeper is egregious
and for the rest, it is only a hiatus

till a passing maid turns it up
whichever way she does a cup
causing a new life to be short for lack of sand
and no musicians to play the band

It is not poetic to consider aeons imprisoned in a child's beach pail
filled and left for life to survive, no matter how frail
all the time that stood and was swept in the wind
sand that traveled but never ceased