April 11, 2004... I think it makes me the oldest.

[butterflydreaming]

Before you, go I

 

Into the later years

Thirty now, plus two

 

Nothing different for me here

An arbitrary marker

A number without meaning.

 

Before you go, I

 

Would like to show you this

How life ahead yet stretches

 

As short, or as long as one will choose

Or as long as one’s contract

 

With ones’s self.

 

What waits ahead can be lived

In a smaller span.

Tied together surely

 

Unlike the moments of myself

Strewn across my first three decades

And a pair of years.

 

I have prayed my life like rosary beads

Slowly and with a troubled heart.

Whispers on cold beads

 

A handful more

My life in my hands.

 

Deliberate as prayer, I will live;

Deliberate as ink on paper;

Deliberate as a lucid dream

 

(Which is something I have yet

To learn

To do.)

 

Like a spiral staircase

My coiled life before me rises

And I must step with care

 

But birthdays come

And I can pause

And sit upon this stair.

 

Familiar, and older than I

Melancholy comes to wish me well.

Her gift, a bit of ink and paper;

 

She asks me slyly

Will I go

Before you

 

And makes my answer,

This paper prayer,

Loop back to itself like a rosary string.