Good evening, your highness.
How is your sleep now in winter?
When leafless walnut trees show their smooth gray bark,
Effectively when all the trees seem mellow and ill
As if something is missing there,
Where the branches grow from their stem nodes.

Something is breaking there.

Your Highness, I am too young,
Something new still trembles inside me,
Something does not know how to let itself go
Along the road
And opposes its own nature,
I am like a newborn not accustomed yet to resignation,
I would like to succeed even if the odds are against me,
I would like to control the back-and-forth movement of the sun
As if it were a golden pendulum,
And

Then I awake and I am sorry
That I complained
It is winter time and everything seems to grow
And I am happy.

The light breaks into sparkles,
Life is an old habit, your highness,
Rebel sparks fleeing their mother’s eyes,
Like incandescent dust,
A Eucharist from centuries ago.

To be old and white
and not ashamed to walk in the rain with a black umbrella,
to be obviously painted in white
like an old-fashioned mill,

so white that even the white cherry petals are
too heavy for the crown of your head
Such as you look out of place
compared with other people, with the red cars, with the rain
inside children’s nostrils

you keep on walking, wise like a tin toy drummer,
bringing to life the whole orchestra,
waking up those who believed they were awake,
you are the white of the paper
upon which the world wrote a masterpiece
and erased it

I carry my bags beneath
my no longer baby blues,
partly framed
and closer to grey

The bags darken with their weight
and they unwittingly pull
the eye down
from the splayed crows feet

I carry my bags

A house that needs a cleaning
Gardens that need tending
Groceries for the larder
And a fence that needs some mending

Grass is nearly one foot high
The dog, he needs a walk
He's gotten just so overweight
But, who am I to talk

Donations to deliver
Things that need be done
A tree to trim a little
But no time to have fun

It takes up all of my spare time
It almost makes me dizzy
I've been retired seven years
And I've never been so busy

I hope you will be there with me
In the long winter without spring:
Ever green, star bright, true north.

The pines bent under the weight of snow
Are glad of the long-awaited rest.
We will tuck beneath white sheets.
My roots tangle with yours -
Lean your limbs on me,
I will hold your hand.

I will love you as you cough,
I will love you as you fall,
I will love you in all sickness.

In our autumn we will gather harvest,
A wealth of sweet golden years well-ripened.
When the storms come
And night darkens our hearth,
I will keep a fire for you.
My black coal-heart burns slow.

Because you are mine.
Because I belong to you.
Because when we return to earth
And become good loam,
The flowers that grow on me
Will bloom for you.

FACE-IT

              Fix- it

      Don't -force- it
  *        *        *        *      
Show- it and embrace- it

Facing a timeless jade
Old show façade
Not a test or a grade
Is it old Holiday Parade?
Old show face privacy
Confidence meet bravery
Facelift grave yard shift
  
*        *        *        *
Oldster-Hipster-once
A-Youngster-Cra­nkier
Scrooge old geezer
*             *
Old City Mobster
Old show face
Gets riskier on the run
Once young gun

Serene but sassier
Getting up earlier
New show wiser
In the right place
Old show face