Beneath the palling skin
wrinkling into translucent luminescence
sagging into jowls, into sacks beneath chins
into peeling at the elbows and knees
into being worn with less care now.

Beneath the loosening weave of muscles
stiffening, slowing the upright jaunt
to a cane-curbing shuffle
unravelling, unflexing, untwining
quickening the arrival to stillness.

Beneath a crashing network,
shorting synaptic messengers
deliver the letters of language,
postcards of places, packages of memories
to the wrong address, for the wrong reasons,
or late, or never.

Within a crumbling castle of bones
creaking fragility haunts
the laboured light
that is neither night nor dawn
but up and down the stairs of
the ever-shortening breaths
embedded—
the dark monarch is slaving away.

Buried deep within,
Sisyphus, a clenched fist sized boxer
in the unlit ring,
always coming out second-best
against the unbeatable
inevitable, one-two of time.

Ignorant as muscle,
the heart, pumping, weakening,
transforms passive life
into fears, thoughts, aches, pains, and attacks
of four-walls-staring questions.
Meditation and a frightening clarity
become its intense progeny.