The wheel of time

 

A child’s sparky fascination,

Its smile radiating tenderness,

Enjoying free gifts of joy,

Holding the coins in piggy bank

bigger than any gold mine.

 

An adolescent’s evocative showcase,

All out shimmering and sizzling,

The highly stylized teeny hoppers,

The follies of love or infatuation

sinuous, clandestine and damning.

 

Mad with love

the youth’s audacious installations,

Ephemeral love on moonlit nights,

Rigorous and virulent in its grip

(almost sinister and vampirish),

Flamboyantly goofy, zipping and zooming,

Squealing adrenaline rush,

Frantic and fidgety,

Spectacular and grand.

 

Stirring, intrepid spirit of middle age

to carry the domestic yoke

amid all the social cockfighting,

Skimming over the competitive scum,

The shifting, virile nature

of the greying years

spangled with nostalgia

for the erstwhile peaks,

So much the passing time speaks.

 

Now on the other side of age,

The realigning of compromised reality,

The poignant reminiscences of youth,

Now surface the skin furrows uncouth,

Time’s acutely roving work

etched on the skin’s landscape now,

The startling storage of lifelong pursuits

now almost wreckage,

The soaring imaginations gone,

Draped in humbling eerie

the thoughts of afterlife swarm,

Gingerly waggling nostalgic gait

seems just death’s bait.

 

The trivializing passage of days,

Gone are the bright rays,

The world just a turbulent grey now,

Snippets of life barely chugging ahead

through a dreadfully narrow lane,

And a scowl and frown,

Or some odd chuckle,

Thus goes time bulldozing over us.

 

The touristy venture from

self-congratulation to self-flagellation,

Bones in disarray,

Eyes grave and serious,

A helpless witness to the shifting landscape,

An invalid clinging to convalescence dreams,

Begging for stipends and allowance

of some more drab fruitless days,

Pleading for pennyworth of life,

Poor and miserly soul

soliciting help from the angels,

Taking it to be a paradise,--

but drudgery in dungeon it is,

Horrid apparition of death hovers above,

Aah, the subversion of life and its fraudulence!

Then the last wish,

‘If nothing more, give me at least

a splendid, ceremonial grave,

Let it not be a pauper’s grave

without mourners at the funeral.’

 

The last breath fluttering a farewell

with one final wish,

‘Let there be

silk-thread embroidery in my name!’