Like a Ghost of My Former Self

I was never a heavyweight, tough as boot leather, an artist on skates, or one calm on ‘high wire,’ still with years, if transparent, feel sure of feet’s purchase. These days travel feels lighter, emotional baggage or need for folks’ praises more part of my past, and a poem oft satisfies taste more than spice can. Still, I’ve passport to freedom whose wings are uplifting, pen, pencil, and paper, the air of my dreams, my sky’s ceiling lacks limits that hold back my heart’s flight! Oh, the track left by pencil knows nothing much lighter, some day’s dawn, a bird’s song competes with moods traced but a poem’s more humane, rhyme’s perfume mists absence. At the top of my game, when I’m under the weather, the gap just expands ‘twixt known fact and desire and grok well that what’s absent are parts I’d count righteous. When ‘deceased’ show up missing, I find that the adage that “absence makes feelings more fond” gets surpassed by the emptiness brought if a friend or of my clan. And brain’s age too is felt as words’ spelling goes drifting, know words got misspelled (more the puzzle it seems), and their fix a cruel paradox well out of brain’s sight. There’s both balance afoot and past balance far brighter as tool bag gets emptied, life’s sharing’s still graced. May the ghost you see here float above adolescence. Long Tooth July 8th in 2021