Methuselah (In Danger Of Failing) Poem by Luke J. Holt

I've been thinking in bubbles for years
And have not a moment to lose
I've already lost so many
My past like a swamp or old soup sitting out old and distilling
My future a dry snake in sand or dumb grey anvil teasing it's touchdown from the spindly noose of a crane.
The first morning thoughts that choke on the powder of tears, former sleep, dizzy epiphantic waking in sheets like a bird let of its blood on the hunter's board, wet and clean and reasonably dead.
I watch this distended morning's pewter turn to blue curds and whey
December's docility short-lived like a crush with crux in the latch that squeaks never with every waft and keen of rib and meat's tenant
In some spanked red alcove in some purgatory hidden beneath a street of chest on which few fingers ever walked.
Don't mock my languid steps on undisturbed ponds, egret.
I've only begun to transcend my own weightlessness
I have tufts of shame for garments and bathroom soap for skin
And what thrown away sculpture of something poorly built in ill repair aging and showing defects obvious as broad day and sad as a disease in childhood's bed.
People i use as stethoscopes
Probing with their cold nerves for my own heart
Somewhere in the neural limbo where hard scabs still hex the threshold like piles of black cancer
In flummoxed alleys inhabited by the same voiceless ghost who commandeer the lens with gestures sated in their meaning and dead like their requisite flowers.
Under that sun round as an owl's bald eye in a flaking tree's gnarled concavity
My body's pan low on minerals
The strainers lacking gold
Not much happens faster than getting old
The oldest on God's grey earth
It seems to die slower than immovable Methuselah
Who endures like some deity's omnipotent finger

Tested by time and it's fire
In spite of the sun's cold bleach
Like one of your round paper kites
Always in danger of impaling
But thusly by windows at night
Like a man who's in danger of failing