Mirror of Life

‘You look haggard’, he claims

There is balefulness in the undisputed truism.
I’ve been avoiding him, avoiding his callousness, his damn …honesty.

‘When did you get so …OLD?’ he asks,
with a combination of awe and truculence.

He squints, leaning toward me, scrutinizing.
Pulling his head back, he looks down his nose,
making one chin of two.
Sighing, he relaxes and the fold of
fatty tissue, magically reappears.

‘Where did THAT come from?’ he queries
but with a greater sense of rhetoric than surprise.

The expression relaxes, loosing focus,
no longer questioning.
His mood, suddenly languid, lethargic
and – worse - apathetic.

‘Pull yourself together, you idiot’ he scolds.
‘It was only a matter of weeks ago that you
had a golf ball-sized tumour removed from
your silly head; you should be dead!’

He straightens, the sternness holds until…
gradually, beginning with the eyes, it starts
to rescind.

‘Stupid bugger!’

It starts with a small twitch, a slight upturning
at the right corner of his mouth…
then he is laughing, REALLY laughing.
I haven’t seen him laugh in a long time.
It feels good…

‘Let’s meet more often and…you know…chat.’ he suggests.

I think, yeah… yeah, I could live with that.

Chris Birrane © 2013