Most guys of an age, let’s face it (or maybe let’s not) 
grow thick and long in the tooth 
and are thinning up top 
Others, the ones that work out, stand forth 
like steel sculptures, shiny skulled, at senior events,
rusting in spots
 
To send even a ‘recent’ photo,
I mean, not yesterday exactly,
with my missing tooth and the cyst burning like a red tower
in a wasted portion of the kingdom 
of the phiz…
but the day before, or the day before that,
may perhaps be regarded as an indulgence in ‘paint to sell’
I prefer to believe I have let them, my correspondents, 
down easy
 
Oh, and for the record,
I am working on getting thick, and bald, 
and generally not so spruce
It’s coming along
And yet, to send a photo only-a-few-years-back,
can it be so misleading?
I mean, I think (though I can be corrected)
I still clean up pretty, sort-of
until you kick the tires 
 
02.05.22
                        

The shape is everywhere
It is the usual shape
The shape that lets in the sunshine.
It’s the shape of light
 
You shape up the day
You shape my joy, my delight, my play,
my nights
You are the shape of time, you configure my space
You shape the rainbow of coins in my hand,
and I spend them on you
I offer you my shape, my twisty shape and shift 
As the English say, we rub on
We configure the future
We reconfigure the past to marry the present 
we will ever shape up
 
I know that I am in the shape I am,
still breathing, still kicking, 
squarely, and roundly, because 
of the shape of you
 
*after the instrumental song “Shape of You” by Attila Fias, 
heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyh1PIXZAI
                        

I can’t think without eating
I don’t (necessarily) mean junk food
and maybe not what others think of as snack food –
     but we’ll get to that 
My wife eats cereal – good cereal, not that sugary stuff
I eat – well, here I am, getting to it – granola, not just any
     but French Vanilla Almond Granola (got all that?)
I don’t know what the French have to do with it,
It’s not foie gras
or any of the many things the French eat and I don’t 
…unless of course it’s something with chocolate, 
in which case happily all nations may apply 
I have my standards: not the high-end, too bitter for words,
super dark varieties harvested by third-world fingers 
(and what’s my own carbon finger-print for all this chocolate?),
but not too low either, except on special occasions, Halloween,
     Christmas, the ecumenical eating days,
and always open-mouthed for M’n’Ms, 
      which seem to work for every occasion
 
So as habits go, I cut myself some slack (don’t we all?)
My father smoked cigarettes almost literally until he died 
And I am giving now-legal cannabis (which back in the experimental years
we called pot, grass, weed, smoke, maryjane)
a respectful pass
And as for booze, having cocktails with my increasingly sophisticated 
      children is nearly the sum of my indulgence
So that leaves food; and, of course, coffee, 
which, as it happens, goes really well with chocolate
 
If we are what we eat, 
am I getting any sweeter? 
I do not appear to be getting any smarter,
or more thoughtful,
in fact, it empties me out to pursue so simple a question 
     as ‘what does food truly mean to me?’
I will dwell upon this poser at some later, smarter date, 
but I need to munch some granola first