Looking back to a time when I was younger…  I found in a folder of “stuff” I wrote a quarter of a century ago; and thumbing through it, I found a poem I wrote dated Monday, September 16, 1991.  That date was four days after my fifty-sixth birthday.  

No Warranty

The rudest shock of middle age

might have been anticipated

if I had been paying more attention, 

especially when Daddy died

after rotting from the inside with cancer,

and Grannie’s heart stopped one day,

and they were just part of the evidence.

What could I have been thinking

when I looked into Viola’s casket

to see lying there the cold remains

of hot shared adolescent beauty...

or when I read in the paper

about Richard Powel’s not surviving,

the boy who had the gym locker

next to mine all through high school,

even long enough to go to college.

These assembled parts,

this collection of bones and sinew,

blood and other assorted fluids,

this whole complete thing that I am,

this machine that thinks and feels

slipped into general use with no warranty.

Satisfaction is possible

but not guaranteed.