Autumn

It can be all consuming
As you stand looking unassuming
At the thronging masses
As you stand
Looking, you think, just like someone else in glasses.
As time passes
With the ferocity of a hungry housewife
With the wind taken out of her January sales
And as the high winds of aging prevail
Blowing away at your pirate past
Leaving you middle-aged
Half-mast, yardarms creaking
You seem no more than a fleeting reminder
Of the more important details
Of a life seemingly lived.
You suddenly recall
All the times you could have been
More sensitive
While at the same time asking
What’s a wrong for if it cant be forgiven.

You’re getting older
Years are reaching stretching
Like Virginia Creepers
Trailing around your once bonny baby blue peepers
A leafing legacy of vines
You’re now more inclined to call laughter lines.

You’re getting older
Something’s got to give
Head’s pounding a beat
You’re in trouble
As a thousand thought policemen’s feet
Trample down the wisdom you wore so well
For so few decades
You’re almost bored
At the silent rages
The maelstroms that seem to occur
Whenever teenagers
Those indefinable paraders
Of exuberance and folly
Who bully their way
Without even saying sorry
Into your slightly tarnished vision.

It’s no longer rock’n’rollable
You’re inconsolable
It’s uncontrollable
You’re getting older
Head’s taking a beating
Something’s got to give.
The toil and troubling
Of these muddling self doubts
Leave you puzzling
Demanding to know
What it’s all about.
So not for the first time
You give yourself licence
To anagram silence
And it seems, not for the first time,
Life itself has stopped.

It’s a cold moment
A growing old moment
These are those terrifying moments
You think you might not have given enough.

You want something to ease the stages
Of the passing ages
A pearl of wisdom
To keep you strong
Something to tell you you’re not wrong
You belong
But whoever tells you
The joy of aging is wasted on the aging
Who think that youth is wasted on the young
Is an idiot –
A Pop psychologist with allusions to Wilde
But surely Oscar’s greatest delusion
Was to continually give so much kudos
To nothing more than the aging child.

It can’t be less than now.
Very soon, it will never be that again.
Was that distant dewdrop melancholy
Really such a rosy picture
Is what’s round the corner really
Such a post-apocalyptic future.
While you’re soul searching
Sinking into the quagmire of the past
Don’t forget the teachings
The lessons that last
And can survive
The mutiny of middle age
Those storm at sea disruptions
And the scrutinous brutality
Of your self-effacing assumptions.

It’s a massive responsibility
But one we must shoulder
Because nothing on earth
Or the seven seas
Will stop us from getting older.

You’re setting sail
Not a shipwreck
Journeying to distant lands
There’s a dawn on the water
Where the sun sets deeper
Making golden moments
Of the shifting sands.
Be golden like moments
Golden like leaves
It’s the Autumn of life
You’re holding in your hands
And do you want to crush it
Let it be powdered away
Or crash it
So you’re floundering
In a shallow bay
Be a castaway grounded
On some certain unsure
Where the rocks tear and claw
At your youth once more.

Still you want something
To ease the stages
Of the passing ages
A pearl of wisdom to keep you strong
Something to tell you you’re not wrong
You belong
But whoever tells you
The joy of aging is wasted on the aging
Who think that youth is wasted on the young
Is an idiot –
A Pop psychologist with allusions to Wilde
But surely Oscar’s greatest delusion
Was to continually give so much kudos
To nothing more than the aging child