Decades

Un

Like funfairs or amusement arcades

Decades

Are not, after all, a laugh.

They’re no fun,

They cannot be outrun.

From time to time, I’m

Deluded into thinking

That I’ve made a gain,

Or overcome some

Injury or setback

And now, I’m back on track,

Rolling on like a moving train.

But Decades will never let me get

Away with that

They rush past and overtake,

Faster and faster.

 

In the nineteen fifties they bought smog

To pollute my young lungs

They bestowed whooping cough and asthma on me,

Then they killed my mother in flu epidemic

A death to set me up for life.

The nineteen sixties

They brought bullying and miseducation,

At the hands of nostalgia addicted dregs

Of a dying empire.

The seventies sweetened life

With sex and drugs and rock and roll

Since then, it’s been downhill ever since,

Like the falling pebble that moves the small stone

that moves the bigger stone,

that moves the small boulder,

that moves the bigger boulder,

that starts the avalanche.

 

I saw that sweep my father away,

Why did I ever imagine myself immune?

 

Decades

Are not, after all, a laugh.