Looking for Harmony

 https://youtu.be/KiV7Vo9k8RM

Rant

I don’t want to be old

I don’t want to make excuses 

About my unsteady step

I don’t want to turn and face 

Scary things inside my body. 

I don’t want to watch the watchers

No longer watching me

I don’t want them to say

Tsk, tsk, 

And shoot sly winking smiles

(Bet she was a looker when she was young)

At one another, as they ogle those 

Ungreying others in their quick strides 

Toward the myriad of their tasks,

Stumbles and surprises 

And I don’t want to be invisible

Like the old ladies drooling 

In their wheelchairs 

In the warehouses set up for them

In our cruel national repugnance

And nor do I

Want a special driver’s license,

Discounts to keep my teeth ship-shape,

My hearing keen, 

My any, many premiums at an all time low!

Call now! 

I don’t want the faux deference 

From a passel of hustlers looking

At me and thinking there must be a 

Way to make a buck or two. 

They have no idea how rage 

Turns to fire

And how I can and will

Obliterate their dreams, along with 

Anything else getting in my way

Don’t suggest it’s time to put in

An elevator to carry 

My looming infirmity upstairs

Do not reconfigure my 

House to match what some greedy 

Snake-oil salesmen would like to peddle—

Short of consignment to one

Of those places eating up any 

Legacy and fortune that will be left 

To the children—for I care not  

About someone else’s dreams, 

Of course, and by the way,

Fuck them, fuck them and 

Their coarse green dreams of dollars. 

Leave me alone. 

Do not patronize

Do not share a friendly elder joke

Do not turn in your delimitus 

Because you wish to avoid my belittling

You cannot see it coming, 

You cannot touch my power. 

And anyway, 

You won’t find me

And you won’t know me

And if you try 

You will spoil just like the 

Rotting apples on the ground

Of my autumn birthday 

And if somehow you see

The tracks of my shoes

In my muddy garden 

As I kick all that’s in my way

You will know, 

Because you read these lines, 

That every golden woman 

Fighting the platitudes and 

Cheap dismissive assignations 

That accumulate like leaves from

My Japanese maple just before they fall  

Is I. Is me. She. We. 

No graceful aging here, 

No airbrushed portrait, no giving in, 

No forgiving of assumptions and

No starting over in

The  constraints of time. 

None of this. None of that. 

No nothing but the raw edge of 

A life lived gasping for the breath

Of meaning and of relevance, 

Though knowing in the end 

It’s mostly dust, and the silvered,

Lonesome, wayward jangle of

A few stars along the way.