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I died in my 20s
I had hope, energy
I had dreams that I was sure I was gonna make it happen
I had youth

Oh my youth
The belief in rocking the world
The belief in a better future
The belief that I was the main character of the story

I died in my 20s
What happened with that bright morning?
Why is it so gray and dark now?
Is it because the hope is gone?

The whole beauty and beliefs are now a pile of ashes and pain
The entire dream went to trash, buried with my young soul.
The hope was supposed to be the last one to die, it was the first.
And the youth melts every time I look at myself in the mirror.

I died in my 20s
And I traveled from hope and smile to pain and a cold tea on the desk
All that in the blink of an eye, as fast as the light
Faster than I thought it would be.

Our civilization created a bunch of Gods
Gods to explain everything
Gods that are good and bad.
But the most merciless God is named Time.

I died in my 20s
And this God doesn’t listen to your clemency
To all your prays of “please, give me one more chance”
“Please let me tell  I love them”

Your please is basically nothing for it
And then the chance passes
The wind blows, and with the wind, our life passes
And I didn’t even notice

Because I died in my 20s
Like soldiers of comically varying heights
I line up my pill bottles along the border
  of my place mat for morning roll call
Some plastic, some glass—
  Green, white, purple, yellow, and gold
Each with their own earnest promise—
Energy, metabolism, muscle function,
  allergy relief
And I earnestly swallow each down
Willing each to complete their mission
To find success in the battle against time
Willing them to bring new life
  to this tired body of mine

© 2025 Joan Zaruba. All rights reserved.
For several mornings now, this poem has asked to be written while I dutifully take my morning vitamins. I hope others can relate in how I find humor, hope, and a little sadness in this routine.
Deep down, I've rotted,
Pieces of me fall away,
Rusty sheet metal plates.
Cadmus May 22
You don’t notice it at first.
Not really.
Life keeps you busy with noise, with dreams, with the next thing.

But then one day,
you cross an invisible threshold.
There’s no signpost, no celebration
just the quiet erosion of what once mattered.

The body falters first.
Not dramatically - no, it’s more insidious than that.
You wake up sore from sleep.
You get winded climbing stairs you once ran.
You start measuring your days in energy, not hours.

Then come the dreams
the ones you clung to like anchors.
They begin to dissolve.
Some shrink into hobbies, others vanish with a sigh.
And the ones that remain?
Too fragile to chase, too old to birth.

Your beliefs shift too.
Not because they were wrong,
but because the world keeps insisting you make room for things
you once swore you’d never tolerate.

You adjust.
You settle.
You survive.

But the worst part
the part no one warns you about
is the people.

One by one,
they begin to leave.

Some give you time.
They let you prepare your goodbye.
Others vanish mid-conversation,
leaving cups half full and promises unfinished.

And what’s cruel is not just that they’re gone
it’s that nothing fills their space.
You try.
You pretend.
You build new connections like patchwork quilts.
But nothing fits quite right.

Because love, real love, isn’t replaced.
It’s carried
as ache,
as memory,
as absence you learn to walk around like a piece of furniture in the dark.

You keep going, of course.
What else can you do?
You make tea.
You water the plants.
You smile at strangers and nod at the sky like it still owes you something.

But deep down, you know:
This is what it means to age
not the wrinkles, not the gray.
It’s the slow, silent disappearing
of everything that once made you feel
alive.
Aging is not just the passage of time , it’s the quiet art of learning how to let go, again and again, without ever quite mastering it.
Cadmus May 21
🚂

We board with desire.

We return with clarity.

And somewhere between the stations,

we learn

What was attainable.

And what was worth carrying.

🚊
This poem captures the quiet transformation that time brings. We begin our journey burdened with ambition, desire, and expectation—only to return tempered by experience, having shed what we once thought essential. It’s a meditation on simplicity, loss, and wisdom.
neth jones May 11
within a coma of mouth   crept at by thieves      
hooked away the woe-ing jewels of his teeth
his face  loaved in upon the calcified essentials
(soft claw  featured  like a boxing glove)
   and the desert reclaims                                              
          ­  live mummification of the whole arresting body
proclaimed a priest-ful stickman

other realms visit this hospital bed
mothering away gifts in honour
bowing whilst backing   they withdraw
                                         his vitality

                               - peaceful veils
Mario / 08/05/25
removed approx 08:30 13/05/25
Aging is a process that takes you by surprise,                                                        ­
                                                                ­                                                      
  one day you see a reflection you don't  recognize                                                 ­                               
                                 ­                                                                 ­          
Wrinkles where once smooth skin used to be,                                      
                       ­                                                                 ­                              
  fine lines around your eyes you missed completely                                              
                                                                ­                                                      
No amounts of lotion will make it go away                                                             ­                                                     
           ­                                                                 ­                                       
  When did your body betray you, no
permission  gave                                                ­                                                    
                                                                ­                                                
Eyes once so vibrant have now begun to fade,                                                
                                                                ­                                                      
in them a faint glimmer of your glory days                                                             ­                                 
                               ­                                                                 ­                   
 No wonder they say. you're only as young as you
feel,                                                
           ­                                                                 ­                                      
You still feel young inside, this is so surreal                                                          ­        
                                                        ­                                                        
Then the aches & pains start to catch up to you,                                                    
                                                                ­                                                      
 is when you realize the damage the years can
  do                                    
                                                                 ­                                                   
So caught up in life before you get the
chance                                                           ­ 
                                                               ­                                                      
 to be able to know you're a victim of
  circumstance                                              
   ­                                                                 ­                                                
  So, breathe in deeply, give into your
fate                                                             ­                 
                                               ­                                                                 ­  
and promise to enjoy living before it's too late
I've thought a lot about it
enough time to pass
the melodramatic fits of passion
I house regularly in this skin of mine

That maybe the end of the world isn't at my door step
and that maybe I can live without your mahonany eyes, yet
I feel a yearnful pull to the softly spoken words
you renounce

Maybe it really wasn't meant to be
And I wasn't meant to be devinely yours
your one and only love for all of my life
I was only 14 when I loved you and
I coersed my own mind to belive that I would only have one love
like that in my life

This realization has felt like
Maybe I have grown
Maybe my girlish teenage mind has began to see reality
Like Messieurs les enfants
born yesterday but grown the next
overnight I lost the child version of myself
to the evermoving trail of time

or maybe I can just feel my prefrontal cortex developing
Missieurs les enfants is a french film in which  3 children are transformed overnight in to adults and their parents were transformed to infants, it covers the trope of rapid aging and basic ideas of human nature.
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