At this turn of fifty,
the pain isn’t figurative —
it is literal.
It’s a corporeal manifestation
of what used to be
poetic and tragic.
Youth broke hearts,
and feelings tore innards.
The joke is that the heart
still breaks —
and now it’s not just that pain:
the shoulder, the knee, the heel.
The validation of abstractions
into the concrete.
What divine irony.
Mary Carson said it best
all those years ago:
Nature is cruel.
Man, vindictive.
Age gives you wisdom —
and the price was always
pain.
I sit and stare at my phone.
Images swipe past, as do voices.
They all tell me stories;
They all give me choices.
But I’m surfeited with life and death.
And can’t truly tell what seems better.
I must have handed this decision
To a love who loved in some love letter.
Now things aren’t clear as I stare.
I can’t think of a tomorrow.
Then may be smiles I can’t see,
Now is just a tsunami of sorrow.
So perhaps, as the summer wanes
And blistering heat turns into rain,
I might choose a brand new story,
As time helps me live beyond the pain.
Read about wars;
Heard about deaths;
Know human beings
And their penchant for power.
Fairy tales spoke of it:
Witches who killed princes,
Then priests who killed witches—
Even those who healed.
April brought sweet showers
That the dead could not dance in.
Yet wars were fought,
History was written—
Differently, for different powers.
Gods upon millennia
Passed.
And human beings remain
Stupid.
Clinging to faith, or awe,
Taught by fear
Of being so small
In the glowing massiveness of universes.
Unrealising:
We come from stars, too.
Yet we choose death,
Born of greed that strips
Root from tree,
Child from mother—
To fight for strips of land
That will never remain ours.
Nor will the name
Your dead mother gave you,
That the world remembered
For just an age.
Hearts Still Care 
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