Skins

Age 10 slough. Age twenty slough. Age thirty slough. Age forty and fifty slough and so on. Age sixty was a mighty shedding, the polished scales rattling in the very teeth of death. Wriggling skins, some actual skins, much metaphorical molt, ephemeral epithelial layers of self. Shadow buzzards; those gormandizing birds that exfoliate entropy, they that aid the slip-sliding away of all pivotal and transitional days, they now sing my late peeling songs. Enough. Basta! This year my skin is stuck to word-bones and only a starving raptor could peck away this pelt and sheathing, and not yet not while I still have skin in the game.