Aging
Your skin--
filmy,
limp,
papery-thin
with electric blue veins
that form ridges and lines.
In their azure blue form
they look like rivers
across your pale epidermis.
Like a pug dog, your skin
is baggy and loose,
shriveled by age,
morphed into something
else entirely, something you used to fear.
Your skin becomes
more blemished
with each passing year.

Your hair,
once delightfully blonde,
has turned to gray,
streaked and varied,
like the years that have passed.
I can hardly remember a time when it was
virgin pure
when not a single silver streak
penetrated
the thick array of white-blonde.
Now, after many years of beauty and fame
the hair has been shorn short,
and bears little resemblance
to that which you prided yourself in
many years ago.
One page of one chapter has been flipped
and is entirely gone.
You will never peer into the mirror
and comb your shimmering locks
again.

Your once
limber-timber
body
has turned to dust
and ash it soon will be.
To bend is a hard endeavor
and will likely injure something else,
your fatigued muscles perhaps,
which like the rest of you,
are slowly dying.
The bones are brittle
and are now just a frame for your paper-thin skin.
The legs which used to run and jump,
are barely able to hike up the stairs
and stumbling is near-guaranteed

for the eye-sight is failing.
You once only needed glasses
to deliver yourself
from the blind tunnel you walked in
to the colorful world,
now it takes much more,
and even then,
things look fuzzy and blended
like a smudged oil pastel.

Yet,
even with all such hindrances
and sad partings
that are bound to take place,
you now own a certain grace which I lack.
The willingness
with which you deliver your body
to the slow process of death
is beautiful.
You no longer fight it,
and your mind is not conflicted
when one more thing
is taken away from you.
We will all die,
for neither you nor me is invicible
and will all face an end
before long.
Instead of resisting
the flow of the world
you think back
on the sweet and thorny parts of it
how it was good to you
and bad.
How there is a time for everything
and how your time has ticked and tocked for eightysome years
and now it is time to depart.
I still desperately grasp at my own life,
hoping to hang on to seventy more years of it,
but you give it up with open arms
and smile down upon us
when you are dead
and
gone.