This week I’ve been thinking a lot about how aging creates a fire in the belly. We have limited time left. Some of us furiously scribble or travel or begin to say what we really mean and begin to live the life we imagined. The fire is not blazing but one of a new, gentle burnished glow. Many of us have buried friends, siblings, our parents. We know we can’t stop time (great book, btw) but we are indignant at the changes time brings. As a Boomer, I never thought I’d age, yet daily the mirror accosts me with werewolf-like hairs in odd places. As the hormones twist and shout, I find it amusing to be entering a second stage adolescence . I have much in common with the teenager down the street who sneaks out at night to smoke dope with his friends at the beach. But I am responsible and in my bed tossing and turning trying to get some sleep so that I can work the next day while he is out, feeling like he owns the world. No fair! Today I was reading poems about aging for a workshop I will teach in the spring and I came across this Charles Bukowski poem called “This Kind of Fire.” It made me laugh and it punched me in the gut at the same time. This is what the best poems do. I felt a sharp longing for a world I never knew, when man believed in multiple gods who controlled our fates. Now it feels like no one is out there. this kind of fire sometimes I think the gods deliberately keep pushing me into the fire just to hear me yelp a few good lines. they just aren’t going to let me retire silk scarf about neck giving lectures at Yale. the gods need me to entertain them. they must be terribly bored with all the others and I am too. and now my cigarette lighter has gone dry. I sit here hopelessly flicking it. this kind of fire they can’t give me.
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January 2022
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