Constant Change
Constant Change
'It's terrible beauty,' muttered a sage,
'It is a terrible beauty, this old age.'
His breath stank of metallic must.
His coat was dressed in a coat of dust.
'Alley cats fight over a dying world. It's just..
Uhuh,' stormed a loaded cough, 'it's just!'
Cold spoke through the holes of his fingerless gloves.
His shoulders shook and shuddered like shivering doves.
His brownish white hair on edge stood,
like snakes scavenging for unsoiled food.
'Beauty sleeps in strange places.
Beauty is a ship lost at sea; sinking; hiding; hoping.'
Pupils kept bouncing between the walls of his blood-crawled eyes;
chasing a ghostly bottle and two glasses, meagre in size.
'I have measured time with lost sleeps.
I have measured distance with trails of tears'.
His broom-like arms were stuck to a table of awful pine.
He poured his sorrows into a glass; in the other, mine.
A pauper's beard choked the outline of his face;
Covering what was left of a sad smile: a thin trace.
He raised two fingers to his forehead and started laughing;
a forehead that was dismally pink with the pain of coughing.
'Don't expect change from a whore,
and don't expect life to be fair.
Not everything happens for a reason,
and life happens only for a season.'
His eyes coiled like empty rings shimmering in sheer darkness.
The bottom of his glass spanked the pine in a heartless caress.
'You can't make history without making mistakes.'
A tremor snuck to the edges of his lips,
and curved slowly them into a bow's tips.
His voice broke.
His cheeks began to soak.
'I had expectations, you see.
Things are not always as they appear to be.
I caught a glimpse of her once on a train.
Thought I went mad! Thought I was insane.
She wore dark boots and a darker scowl.
I stopped and waved and smiled.
I waved to the back of her coat.
(Mon amie) I said (do you remember me?)
She turned her neck and hurled a look -
the kind you'd find in a tattered book -
that shot straight through me like an arrow.
It was a speeding bullet from a range close and narrow.
Her shoulders shrugged as her neck was turning back.
Back - Back - Back - Back!
Funny how that word sounds, like a dime-filled sack.
It was as if her careless glance carved
gaping worlds and worlds between us.
I stared at the back of her coat as it bobbled away.
I shouted like a raven into barren night.
(Mon amie, don't you recognise me?
I walked by you when no one else dared to stand.
I who waded through thousands of your red living hells,
have barely caught a broken, blurred glance of your gloomy paradise.
I was your shadow when everything else was afraid of the sun.
I who stared and glared at the watery mirror of your soul,
for years and years on end,
Could barely recognise my faded reflection).
She was gone.'
One end of a pathetic fishing tether was wrapped around his leg;
the other, around the neck of a whimpering bitch he called Meg.
She had eyebrows longer than her tail.
Her muzzle was more acute than a boat's sail.
She buried her muzzle into a pigsty of a floor,
Closely heeding the ticks and clicks above the door.
'Dreams cost money,
Hell! They cost a damn fortune,
but they make us a little less broken.
They bleed us dry,
but Dreams are what make us whole.'
A rumble bellowed from his hunger-stricken gut.
He wired his swollen jaw tightly shut.
An alien voice swam across the stark darkness of the bar,
like the great sparkle that breaks from a raging, shooting star:
'Bottom's up! Life's too short.'
A glimmer flickered through the old man's eye,
like fire that was born yet soon about to die.
'No!' He shrieked while shooting his finger to the ceiling,
Standing and wringing the dog's neck in agonised feeling.
'Life is very long.
It's living that's short.
Yes!
Living is short.
Living is short, and then we die.
You can't defeat the quicksands of age.
You can't resist them.
You can't fight the winds of change.
Don't give up. Just lose like a winner.
End the race with the breath of a fresh beginner.
Everything changes. Everything's changing.
The world runs forward like a river in constant change.
You can't scroll up the same Twitter Feed twice,
any more than you can step in the same river twice.
Change is old: Old as time and old as sin,
and bids new lives in old forms to begin.'
He then looked entreatingly down.
His dog still wore a long frown.
He grabbed the chair's belly, dragging it to his knees.
The chair howled like a she-wolf at unease.
He carried the dog on his lap.
He pat her back. Tap! Tap! Tap!
The dog lifted her downcast head,
like one who was risen form the dead.
'Each paints a different picture of truth.
Each imagines a unique drawing of reality.
Yes! Reality is the work of imagination.
It's a devil that creeps without invitation.'
He clapped his eyes shut like one who was blind,
and in darkness saw light second to none of its kind.
'To the sand-stormed deserts of troubled minds,
Peace is calming rain.
Peace is a castaway heaven that gets further time and again.'
Barely able to stifle a murky fog of sighs,
rapid fists drummed his chest, wishing he dies.
'It's marvellous!' he sobbed, like a prisoner in a cage.
'It is a marvellous waste, this dying wreck of an age.'
Loneliness, indeed, is a dangerous thing;
TV voices that keep you company and sing,
Unless door bells go crazy and start to ring.
By A. Guy