My 43rd Year To Heaven

Dear Eyewearers, I have grown old, and roll my blog - or rather, want to offer you a new poem on the occasion of my 43rd birthday, today, in sunny London.

My 43rd Year To Heaven

History presses like a wall
against our shy backs –

shall we take the floor,
now that nothing costs more

than it did in 1944, and dance?
Life is such that one has to go

in and out of doors of great hotels
to sleep on beds that later are remade

while all the bills get paid
by an invisible millionaire

for some, while others become maids
or valets until their skin goes grey.

The sun will return in the morning
to remind us that the night belongs

to priest and demon equally,
and after the eighteenth-floor leap

into the delicate unspeaking air,
the chauffeurs look the other way.

I was sad before, and may be later today,
and the intensity of our hug

as we watch Niagara's Herculean effort
pour like a slot machine made good

is a long abstract emotional flood.
You and I pump blood and adore

the time we were given to love
but sense, like tiny clocks that must wake

prime ministers to greet mountains,
our time is soon, and all living things die;

or if they live eternally, do so in myth.
Still and mostly because I can't take it,

let's think of ourselves as mythic then,
which, while a bare lie and lonely to do,

makes us cling more closely in the spray
as the mist about us rises from the affray.

poem by Todd Swift