Most Fortily

 

Most Fortily

 

Ticking through another year,

               Softly pausing here

To recollect, to pause again,

               Nestling bravely near

What’s next.

 

My life as text, thusly written,

               Lucky, love-bitten,

Reading back from my first fifty,

               Nipped: kitten smitten:

                              Sex vexed.

                             

Bouts-abouting sweet-nostalgia,

               Cursed-melancholia,

Re-what-abouting history:

               Selecting amnesia:

                              Hex-flexed.

 

Fortily.

More fortily.

Most fortily.       

 

Pausing: Letting go of ghosts: parents, siblings

               Traded for spirits:

Butterflies and cardinals and dragonflies:

               No longer haunted; visited instead.

 

Pausing: Letting go of self-hurt: wrongs and slights

               Traded for re-do’s:

Penance, forgivenesses and charities.

               No longer hunted: sought again instead.

 

Pausing: Letting go of forties: Not. Quite. Yet.

               Yet-traded, tax free:

Deferring and Accruing and Investing.

               No longer burdened: annuitized.

 

Recording over cassettes taped.

Reburning CDs:

Replacing analog with digital,

An all persistent memory that

               Never dies,

               Often cries,

               Will undoubtedly outsize

                              The stuck-in-earning perfect prize.

 

Pausing here, lingering,

               Mashed up: tinkering

Reconstructing stories:

               Pre-fictioneering

                              Pressing play

                              Pressing record—the red button—

                                             Together

                              Tech-spec’d.

 

Most fortily

Near, hyphened, fiftily