Lines Written on My 74th Birthday

Lines Written on My 74th Birthday
by John Bennett
So this is it, this is the end game, boxes of dust-covered books stacked in the living room, arms giving out, organs in the red zone, teeth on the brink, but legs still passably good and sex still poking its head out of the root cellar into a tornado-torn sky, mind churning like a dynamo in a ghost town.
Free me of the bondage of self echoing thru the empty hallways and up the caved-in stairs, okay, can do the refrain from a voice in the shadows of a teetering chronology. Give up the ghost and all else follows.
What a giddy brew of terror and joy, what a sharp jolt of adrenalin as the field narrows and options morph into commands, what a plaintive song floats out of Gabriel’s trumpet over the bone yard of years.
I’m on the hill, the light is fading, the wind rocks the van and I smoke. I don’t give up anything, things are taken away.
A nod to the thunder gods of creation for firing me like a light beam thru the dark sky of awareness.