CAN I WRITE ABOUT AGING NOW?
Can I write about aging now? I'm thirty
(well, okay, I'm twenty-nine, but
really, it's only months
till thirty hits, and I'd rather
have relinquished twenty-nine gamely,
early. So)
I'm thirty.
Can I write now about
how normal everything has gotten?
The way I've taken hobbies up?
My sad, entropic body?
The way my sense of
"Self" has been replaced with a sense
that I'm a mammal running through developmental stages, like:
Romantic Love (ten to twenty-two)
Addiction (twenty-five to twenty-eight)
Preoccupation with Career (that's now)
And I know what's waiting, too:
Death of Parents (around fifty)
First Disease (I will not speculate)
When I Grow Obsessed with What I have Not Done (I'd say at fifty, coinciding
with my parent's death)
I can't write anymore about youth; I think I'll start
on aging now.