Lines

OK so this is a sort of poem.
I promise I won't do this often, but I was looking for something else and found it on my Mac. A meditation on getting older than I ever thought I'd be.

Lines

So we start with 0, which is not O,
no sirree bob, it’s zero,
And an egg,
The quantity of absence,
the quality of incipience,
of the beginning of everything,
or at least of a chicken.
(Incidentally, have you ever noticed that promulgating an egg in three dimensions creates an ovoid, a shape that is both nothing and nowhere. This is an interpolation, by the way. It doesn’t have to rhyme, or be in time)

(And don’t people get excited by zeros? Put three in a row and all their millennia come at once, a year early. They fell for the flim-flam of the three ring circus.
And yes, it does bother me,
and I know it shouldn’t,
that I should rise above
pallid pettifoggery,
piffling pedantry,
platitudinous pomposity and
pusillanimous priggery,
and turn my face to the dawn,

Hash pipe clenched between my teeth
Freudian Slippers on my feet
I contemplate my fissured fizzog
in a mirror short of silver.)

Chorus
Squads of zimmerframes overtake,
If this is living I’d rather be baked
Rah rah, rather be baked
rather be baked, rather be baked
or Peruvian Flaked.

and just as forty brought the reading glasses
and fifty the seeing glasses
so, as the zero rolls on the six,
something once elastic snaps,
and my chest
slumps down
and out.
The 60s model comes with built-in shelving.

I thought I would take some acid to mark the passage of my 60th year.
Then I changed my mind.
And changed it back again, a process I rehearsed
More than once.
Currently I’m confused.
Which one was it?
Again