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What vexes you, L3?
(Or perhaps L2; you collude.)
Your mysterious mechanics grind;
your elegant architecture abrades.

Now you speak, now
declare age or injury
life or experience dissolving
what cohered so long ago
and early
in my mother’s womb.

You tiny tadpole,
you primitive curiosity:
Who could imagine
what you would become?

The notochord is the earliest beginning of
the bony vertebrae and
the remainder of the skeleton

the genesis of all my bones
unfurling,  an innocent
fist opening to the years ahead,

the twisting and bending,
the lifting and bearing
of weights tangible and not.

The days you stretched skyward.
The nights you curled again like a fetus.
The uncomplaining decades.

Now you are vulnerable.

What may I offer?
Ice? Heat? Ibuprofen?
Pain displaces presumption,
the fluid comfort
l took for granted.

You ache.

Therefore, I apply poetry
and consider enjambment, the
unexpected meaningful break
in a sentence or
a clause or
a life

saying, we go on differently now,
saying, this is the hot voice
of infrastructure crumbling,

saying, this is the song
of our later years,
our prehistoric perfection
slowly unbecoming.

Saying, sing.

 

 

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Tags: aging, creative writing, lower back, pain, poem, poetry, spirituality