Poem: Late Walk

 

 

Late Walk

 

the leaves were not as

grey as my hair.  a month

for them was decades.

somehow it mattered

to my cobwebby heart,

that cities of leaves would fall,

garmented in rot, before

i got slabbed down.

 

perhaps.

 

but the change in my

moods appeared in the mottle under

my feet.  there was little

beyond the thin grasp of twigs

to restrain the moths

that wanted the inside of this heart,

to cloister there with their dusky

diamondback riddle of poisonous

unfinished things.

 

such doubts were

as effective as those aphids

which gnawed holes in

the long gone green of youth.

these fears were as monstrous

as a dissolve of worms

to the contours of a robust, colorful

tapestry of life.

 

the roots of the trees passing by

did not assure a moor, such that at any time

i might not let go, lost from history--

and then catapult-flutter off,

far on some cold gale of distress,

lashing out at nothing with

my last exclamations.

 

worse still to land somehow,

and look up, tired and broken,

tilted on a mattress of beetles,

just to breathe.

 

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