Figuring Out Life While Aging
I’ve lost the password to what used to be my life.
The air is strange and I’m losing my sense of balance.
I search through remnants scattered in the home I sold,
Wondering what to keep, or sell, or trash.
In the coffeeshop, the chatter is of family discord:
Recent losses, expected deaths, and mangled hopes
Fall like tears from the balcony, splashing on me,
Where I sit, trying to create a new password.
The arms merchants recruit the awful hungers
of the power mongers and trim their synapses
with greed
Then power mongers hypnotically whisper
to the shamed and lonely ones filled with rigid angers
and find the hungriest to bombast
“the Others are thieves who want
what’s ours. Stop them. Guns!
guns, guns, guns.”
Making ghosts of our children.
Beauty Everywhere- on the Streetcar
The older woman smiles at a baby;
the mother in a hijab smiles back.
The man with a tattoo sleeve
thanks the driver for his transfer.
The proper older lady in her white-trimmed navy blue dress
is gently guided by a dreadlocked younger woman.
The woman in the seat ahead
wears a butterfly-print shirt.
The teen in his black hoodie stands and gestures
the young mother into his seat.
Beauty everywhere.
***
Beauty Everywhere – on the Sidewalk
The young woman in ripped jeans walks
her bike through the intersection
Inside the coffeeshop an older man stops
reading to talk to a kid.
A woman in Tibetan dress walks
with a boy wearing a Spiderman Tee.
A little girl wearing a red polka-dot dress
waves at a streetcar driver.
A woman uses her phone to capture
a front yard flower for Instagram.
Beauty everywhere.
In this dark morning, I navigate
By electric green numbers
And red dots announcing
Civilization – but unaware, sleeping,
Perhaps more than vulnerable,
Lost, fearfully grasping poisonous
Barbarisms, eyes closed
To the common good.
The weight of undiscovered dreams
in my belly
shifts and
the clock that isn’t there
lights up.
Outside of hope
or fear
or understanding,
the orphan
Is restless.
The blanket,
now too heavy,
covers the blurry force of
a kind of morning.
A poem I wrote about the experience of getting older –
Getting Older Stings
Like a spray of hot pebbles – little stings that you feel but shrug off.
Slowly blisters form: skin over tears.
Nodding off during the news,
Getting no questions when I ask for a senior’s discount,
Noticing I think anyone under 50 is young,
Going to retirement parties,
Little stings.
Learning I’m two inches shorter,
Noticing I can’t run up stairs anymore,
Wobbling if I walk too far,
Hearing that child call me an old lady,
Blisters.
Socializing at funerals,
Listening for ages in death announcements
Fretting because I haven’t updated my will,
Wondering who that I love will ‘pass’
before I die.
Joan Vinall-Cox 2012
Learning Living 