Senility Poem by Morgan Michaels

It's when you realize with a start,
with the sudden chortle of wakening
after long sleep, fraught with dubious dreams
that all the assumptions you formed and held
in long-ago childhood, cherished as true;

That won you envious disapproval from family,
reluctant adieux from friends:
family whose disapproval you processed,
friends whose adieux were instructive-
assumptions whose truth you came to doubt- were just

What you thought, as pertains to you: fixed stars
by which you might chart a life with purpose and joy
knowing it would have been disastrous, or worse, un
productive, to assume anyone else's- stars,
even if you're the only one who knew.

That no matter how long you steered and stared-
your own true stars obscured
by the thickish cloud-covers of others,
you knew it would someday clear, and they would stand revealed,
ineffable in valid constellation;

Recalling for you that once-a-year moment of alignment
when all your myriad mirrors tilted to angles, in pallisade,
focus the sun's rays into one mighty beam
causing the hectatomb to burst into flames
tongues rising up in blue empyrean