He who is
tired of learning
has been doing
it for seventy
three years and
needs to rest
Tag: cancer
Homeward bound
Just as well the house
I lived in as a child has
been demolished,
bulldozed, removed from
the surface of the planet
and replaced by two new
houses with no history.
Not that I would want
it still standing but
extensively remodeled
and modernised. No
point in that other than
it representing the spot
on the planet where
I was formed and grew.
What I want, I suppose,
is to magically return
to the functioning 1950s
house, even the 1960s.
Furniture still in place,
pictures on walls, carpets
on floors, ornaments on
shelves, books in bookcases.
And people, people in chairs,
in kitchens, watching tv,
in the garden, welcoming
the New Year, talking of
the past. A house, a home,
reconstructed, revisited,
a place I once couldn’t
wait to escape for new
adventures, new sights
and sounds, new people.
But the past is another
country, and you can’t go back.
He who
To have the last laugh
you need to be the last one
left standing. But who has the
energy for laughing then?
Shredded
When you look back
on your long life
it is as if every detail,
every moment, was
written on a great scroll,
and then put
through a shredder, so
that you are reduced to
picking up thin strips
of paper, each with a
phrase, a headline,
an image, unconnected
to anything else.
Good luck putting
the pieces together.
Your time starts…now
We spend our lives waiting to sit one exam after another.
Double entry
As you stumble through
life you encounter
people you love
and people you hate,
and vice versa.
All you can do is hope,
when you balance your
end of life ledger,
that the former
outnumber the latter.
Down down, IQ is down
After seventy-odd (and seventy odd) years of life I keep thinking I have seen and heard all the worst of human stupidity. But then I read something said by a woman in a red cap, or a crackpot fundamentalist (of any religion), or a loopy flat earther, or a mad-brained creationist, or a Dunning-Kruger climate change denier, or a lobster-potted Peterson follower, or an addled anti-vaxxer, and I realise there is absolutely no depth to which human stupidity cannot sink.
The old schoolyard
The crowd of people
that surround you
at school – friends,
enemies, classmates,
teachers – who once
you knew so well, or
thought you did
anyway. What
happened to them
over the next
sixty years?
Dropping like flies
People keep
dying in their
seventies, like
runners in a
marathon falling
by the wayside,
in sight of
the finish line.
All change
After cancer,
and the chemo,
you keep searching
your body for
changes, any
change at all seems
a bad omen.
