Thefts Hard To Forgive

Thefts Hard To Forgive

I know the worries you carry.
The worst ones.
The dark ones about drowning in riptides of time.

Ebbing flows of time pulled a heist on your treasure houses.
Stole from your stautuary garden the best pieces.
Took from you the most finely sculpted features.

Time hid it's theft with cunning.
Time bought itself time for a getaway by deceit and deflection.

One by one, slow and subtle, firm chisel cut figures get cleverly replaced.
Marble replaced with soft, unfired clay substitutes.
Clay that with time, dried stiff with cracks.
Revelations of lost days, summer nights, spring mornings.
Disappointments after our flesh had time to change the wrong way.

A clever heist, yes. By time, a cat burglar without equal.

Flesh fell away from what we saw of it at its finest hour.
What we once saw in silver backed mirrors and once saw in the enchanting gaze of lovers.

Lovers by the way who came before me. Do you know they needed less of you then than I have need of you now? Consider that as you follow me down into the dusk. Hold that warming thought close to you, like soft wool as the night's chill settles in. You'll know that grasp to be a wise move, come the colder hours.

The models for our first attempts at self portraiture - who were they?
Remember - remember how we posed ourselves as beautiful and implausibly immortal illusions. Now lit under a common bright daylight, these young models report on our decline.

Like gossip columnists, our past selves sneer at what we have become.

Remember the promises we made ourselves as children?
In secret and silence to just ourselves.
Promises that we would never become like those funny old people.

And how they moved also - too slow, too slow.

Never to become like them. Ever.
Now we are just plain, mean old liars.
We are promise breakers to disappointed children.

Don't expect children to understand why unspoken impossible promises cannot and will not be kept.

We fade, we weaken.
We fight, we accept.
We unaccept and thrash.

When we sink into serenity do we cease to speak as a child, think as a child, and put away the last of childish things?

Giving up that fight I think is the the last road sign in the rear view mirror on the way out of childhood; a last dollop of hot wax to seal spell scrolls of Childhood Enchantment. Things change once you know by experience if not science why those most important promises made to ourselves cannot be kept.

All this might be the why behind the need for grandchildren. We need a splint to carry on. And grandchildren are a locomotive power that keeps up going on when we'd rather not. Time with them becomes healing time, when we know certain truths too well.

We come to know what the weight of time does to Unkeepable Promises. Like the promise to never change; to always be there when needed no matter what the world does; to never go away; to never die - or die only when everyone is ready for it so it won't hurt so much when it happens.

I know these heavy, sigh making worries that are yours. Don't I too know such loss, similar - perhaps even the same? Half filled bags of sand reside in my arse where in my twenties was scant difference between the hardness of the chair I sat on and the hardness of derrierre I put in said chair. No more Lenore, quoth the macabre poet crow who sings. Cackles, actually.

Elasticity snapped, change sagged and leached into place slowly, so slow as to fool the daily mirrored inventory of once-hard assets.

You and me both, we wuz robbed of what gave us ragged confidence, and now our oldest and most expeditious defenses against cruel self doubt are gone. In the cold light of late winter season days, your accounting often comes up short. And tallys up to being robbed, embezzled.

Or spent.
Maybe just wasted.
Certainly without a doubt faded.

So what now darlins, do we just lay still and hurry on up with our dying?
Do we wave down upon us flocks of hungry crows to come finish us off early?

Don't think so, my dear darlins.
I don't care to be pecked to death by little flights of dark fancy.
Not by crows or any other form of melancholia.
I won't lay down quiet and I think have my good reasons to think I ought not to go easy.

See, I heard about this Irish storyteller. He's a professional teller of supernatural fairy tales to modern skeptical audiences. He sets his performing stage thus:

"Things are the way they are, because we agree upon them".

That is how he deals sekpticism to the "objective truth" that faeire things - faerie folk, faerie bushes, so on - do not exist.

And me, I don't agree with anyone who says that no low hanging fruit remains. Or says it all is too withered to be worthy of a reach or a stretch. A reach to pick a squeezable peach is never an unworthy gamble, even on long odds. In my book it's so, and mine's the bookie with odds for the least long term regrets.

Perception of what's real - what is it really?
So much more about what we ignore than about what really is.

In truth we see fewer good things before us because we can't hold them in mind.
We hold but a small cupped handful of all that is there to see.
So we end up remembering what we can.
And of that, just what is most familiar.

We forget all but what we prefer for its handy fit to what we've accustomed ourselves to believe.

We think we know what is not out there anymore because we've ignored it.
We toss away fleeting perceptions of what can be once again.
We ditch clues under our noses about what we think can only can't be again.

Like what you ask?