BY THE TIME YOU'RE OLD

By the time thy ashen, peony-skin is wrinkled, and the cobwebs of thy fertile lap are frayed, Thou shalt know that thou, too, wast made of fallible Endidu matter, And thy exotic body is held together by the fear of action and will!

When thou shalt rise thrice in the gloomy moonlight of nights, For early enough the compulsive need will call thee, Where in the shells of toilets the veiled, cosmeticized old age is confined: In hesitant, thieving rummage thou shalt find thyself. By the time thou art forced to walk with thy third helping foot, Like Oedipus's questioning revelation, know: the beneficent holy harness of law and morality Is stripped in modern ages, when thy humanity with thy swan-moving waving swan-nudge, bachelor-whore, and bachelor-whore.

By the time the wailing, bone-crunching martyr-pain approaches you with hip-operation, you will know: in the envy-mark of the mercenary profiteers, interest and merit have always formed a two-faced right - tormenting the hope of the victims in the cynical profit-taking, like vultures circling over prey when they swoop down, mauled.

By the time your witnessing grandchildren come to gaze up at you inquisitively, inquiringly, into the golden age memories of your much-trodden past, your terror - of the trap of certain demise - would have your heart in a vice, coronary asteroids of aortic skulls growing like silent killers in the tunnels of your body, no one will be so prepared, like a sheet of paper, a notebook, that you will be rid of your Alzheimer's, which feeds your Letha forgetfulness, consciously, without a reckoning, without a rubber room!