Selections from
CONCEAL, REVEAL, ANNEAL

"Bargains in the Basement"

In my retirement
There should be a refinement
     of my sense of living,
As my tired body
Guards my glands from atrophy.

My senses diminish.
My potencies have become latencies,
And my body a penitentiary
For senses imprisoned,
     pressed, depressed,
Down to the cellular level.
Living in such cells insults us,
But what can we do?

Whether we lived too well,
     or hardly at all,
Now, the will be's thrill us less,
The wannabees little more,
Though desire's throttle
     can still push us to the floor.
Things flop
     and don't flip back.

Once we were the potentates
     of our possibilities.
Now we inspect the border
     crossings in our draws
To keep them clean.
Our hands are clumsy,
     like paws,
Rapprochement with our selves
     grows finer and finer
Till these cease to be
     studies in clarity.

Nothing can be held
     within our flimsy shelter.
Old films collapse,
Then, sleepwalker scenes
     of our old victories,
Before the present maladies
Caused these to cease to be.

Being diminished,
We are finished off
     gradually,
          with our declining powers.

Such winding down
Can wear us out.
But death is hard to come by,
For we lack the skill to die
     when we close our eyes.
So, each gaze
     seems like the last,
And so each is like the first.
Our amazement fills us
     like the glazing on a cake.

Our borders shrink
     from the world,
Then shrink too.

What we thought we had resolved,
Instead dissolves before our eyes.
What was accessible
     has now become inscrutable.
Our moral inventory is unclear,
And has turned away from us.

We brought ourselves,
     throughout the years,
Busloads of joys and fears
To this great reckoning,
Our winding down party.

But along the way,
We got winded and wounded.
Then our lives rescinded,
And death descended,
Higher Will
     split us open
And we were gone.

          Afterward:

               The Bargain Basement

We miss spent ourselves
     in bargain basements.
Where there were no refunds,
     only refurbished desire.
Besides ourselves,
We became sidekicks to ourselves.
We gave kickbacks to ourselves
     for self-deception.

Our designer clothes
     became second hand
The moment we left the store,
And began the stories
     of our lives.
Then, we compromised
     with truth and lies,
Till, by and by, we died.
Is this not suicide?

What is borne
     is born again
Into the next birth,
     the next body as berth,

But in each breath
     we take...

     we make yet,

                         awake....

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