I got the hint
I can solve the puzzle
But I won't walk away a grand prize winner
I've spent too much on vowels
Trying to put "U" and "I" together
Now I'm left with only "Y"

I want to wake up when I want
And then slowly get to my feet.
I want to have a breakfast
That is very much like a treat.
I want to dawdle over my coffee
And take lazy, leisurely stock.
And, I want to do all of this
Without waking to a clock.

For I hate that awful buzzing
That it takes to shake me awake.
I find the racket ruins dreams
And is too much for me to take.
I want to sit where late morning
Sends its sweet shine in on me
While I sup and sip and dine
Like a member of royalty.

Oh, I am not so snooty myself
That I don’t prepare this repast
With my own two clever hands
And at that, amazingly fast.
It’s almost like my hands want
To hide from my waking mind
That the meal I am having is not
Not the made by Ritz-Carlton kind.

I want to waken to cognizance
In a particularly decadent way.
I find it totally disgusting to
Rush madly into any given day.
I’d sit in smoking jacket and slippers
If I had such magazine attire.
And if it were chilly upon rising
I would magically manifest a fire.

Of course I don’t have a fireplace
To go right along with plain jammies
So instead of brocade robes and such
I very short of mystical whammies.
I can’t witch up this storybook stuff
Of class A, high-class pomposity.
But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t wish
To have it all appear before me.

Once one crosses the forbidden line on the wrong side of sixty.
Not to venture further into the next arithmetical digit.
There begins the journey to another world, even where the angels fear to tread.
All on a sudden one comes under uncountable whammies.

A jinxed land you stray into, full of a craggy jagged reef.
Razor sharp rocks you feel at every step and bleed.
Another shell shock  I devalued you are as a condemned jalopy.
Looks of all you love, speak a strange lingo: you get a creep.

It is anything but the old warm vibes of those years golden.,
Rather an overdose of pity and compassion over-laid with mushy emotion.
A good enough gesture to an infirm or a ******* or one in dotage.
A man past his prime and relevance like a mast broken of a boat sunken.

Written off the priority roster, stowed in a corner,
Dusted, sprayed and showcased as a piece of curio rare.
mothballed with care in medicine on rationed air.
Lest unseen germs of umpteen infections catch them unaware.

An appendage fit to be dumped in old age home.
A social cure-all, as they say, concerned so unwillingly,
A haven as safe as God’s Elysium for progenitors.
To be lionized as the epitome of pride and wisdom.

So adored they are but shunned cannily by every social connection.
A persona-non-grata in all spheres save for gratuitous complimentary doles.
Being in the jinxed circle of seventy is the sin only committed.
A few blessed ones manage to wiggle into the favoured positions.

A few ministerial ballasts, a lottery coup, or a few sine cure slots, a safety net of power & pelf.
The rest for a wallow in the morass of delusive expectations.
Oodles of stale dry sympathy, deceptive tears and bogus bonhomie.
Old raw sores get abraised-the world turns deaf.
……….
It’s a poetry by late Mr S M Ghosh, my late father
An educationist, history teacher and retired principal of  Central Schools,  in India.