WHAT A STRANGE STRAITJACKET AGEING IS

WHAT A STRANGE STRAITJACKET AGEING IS

What a strange straitjacket ageing is

when you’re constrained by your own freedom

to do whatever you want. And forever young

is an attitude you wear like a chip on your shoulder

when the hour that bullies you knocks your teeth out,

and your denatured enemies begin to gather around you

like a wolfpack stalking a sick elk with soft horns

it wields like a candelabra of dozy trees in deep snow.

But I remember my step grandfather at a sawhorse

cutting more wood with a Swede saw at eighty-three

than I could when I was fit and cocky as a lifeboat

in my inflatable twenties. Let him be an example

unto me at sixty-five of the way I should conduct myself

as a senior citizen. So I say in my best Punkinese

to the motherfucker that’s looking at me like an easy kill,

come try your brief, wretched life against my will to live.

There’s a reason I got to be an old dog that’s about

to revolutionize your universe by gutting you

on the shiv of the moon the night’s just slipped

up my sleeve on the q.t. in passing like a fang

I’ve never waxed nostalgic about unless it was stuck

like a last crescent through a petty enemy’s pygmy heart.

Might not sound like it, but I’ve had enough of violence

with the likes of you to last me for the next

ten thousand lifetimes and like my friend Charles Fischer said

to his daughter at ninety-one, don’t try

to understand an asshole, don’t argue with an asshole,

just walk away and leave him for dead, wiping

the blood off your blade on your sleeve like the hour hand

of an alarm clock that just added injury to your insult

as the ambulance rushes you off to emergency

like a poppy in a death cult out of your league,

though I added that last part just to keep you intrigued.

Charles was a happier man than I am. He grew old

more gracefully than I can, and truth to tell, want to

when I’m confronted with a nasty little prick like you

trying to dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee

in a dragon’s mouth that’s still less of an urn

than a furnace that’s going to burn your feelers off

like a grey power surge through the filaments of your lightbulb

I’m going to shatter and scatter like the down

of your fledgling ashes on a Buddha that hasn’t brought me

to enlightenment yet. Or maybe has and I just

conveniently forget whenever the occasion calls for it.

PATRICK WHITE