Ruined by Love—and That’s Not a Bad Thing
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Ever feel tiny? Like everyone and everything else in the world is, by comparison, huge and powerful and towering and you can’t begin to compare, let alone compete? Have you let yourself be measured in comparison with anyone or anything else? Yeah, me too.
But isn’t it worthwhile to break out of that miniscule self-containment somehow? Isn’t the most valid measure of my worth found more truly in what I do as my best self, in what I become over time by growing into a finer and grander version of me? What you see is what you get–for now. And then I plan on continuing my progress as well as I can manage, for as long as I live. That’s all I can promise. With one little [ahem] caveat: I know that the best defense against seeing myself as inadequate to any task is the blessed ignorance of my true inadequacy. So I promise as a small [ahem] part of the larger issue that I will do my best to forget that there is such a thing as the improbable, let alone the impossible, and just get on with living my life, however insignificant it may seem likely to be. [Come on along.]
As long as I can crack jokes about it, there can’t be anything gruesome or terrifying or unnerving at all about dying. I hope. (She said, winking and smiling slyly.)
Pretty Little Graveyard
Pretty little graveyard,
How all your headstones gleam!
How delicate and marvelous
Your mausoleums seem!
It’s sweet and quaint and dainty,
The peaceful way you lie
Filled up with rotten corpses,
Funeral Arrangements
The way the flowers grew in shade,
I knew at once that one fine day
They’d make a funeral bouquet
All prearranged, as though pre-made
By funeral mutes in plumed top hats
And wearing bombazine black sashes,
Their pearly skin as pale as ashes,
Accompanied by coal-black cats
Between the funeral-wreathed front doors,
Their carriage drawn by sleek black steeds,
With passengers in widows’ weeds
As fitting as the hellebores’.
My lead-lined eyelids will insist it’s time to go to sleep,
So don’t be too insulted if I leave to count some sheep;
I find you fascinating and quite scintillating too,
So please don’t take it wrong if I should conk right out on you.
Your dazzling personality and brilliance are so bright
It pains me to, but go I must, and bid a fond Good-Night!
Pay no attention to the way I’m backing out the door,
And know your super-excellence could never be a bore.
I sigh, I yawn! But, for all that, it can’t be you that tires:
I rustle my hands in taloned glee
Because the deadly recipe
From neither pots nor spoons nor pans
But sort of cauldron-cooked began
To boil and burble, burn and bake
And make a horrid bellyache
In which I openly rejoice
From the bottom of my heart at the top of my voice
Since it eats at the spot whence woe betides
I mean, my enemy’s insides
I hate to admit that it drives me nuts
How I loathe the cretin’s creepy guts
So I will make like a fleet of moles
And bore them full of a flock of holes
Filling me full of ironic glee
And comeuppance for him who so bores me
Since that’s why I really stayed in school
To grow up and be a bad little ghoul
And lest you forget yourself, sneer or scoff
Be nice to me or I’ll bump you off
So Soon Begins the End
Upon my word! This is a fix
I never thought to find me in–
at least not find for five or six
more decades, when my hair’d grown thin
and belly fat, and joints grown weak
and brain grown mushier than it had
been yet, but I age as we speak–
so rapidly–why, this is Bad!
I never dreamed that I would age
before a hundred years or so,
and then, at most, to turn more sage;
oh, this is a grubby way to go!