Watch Your Step, Old Man

You don’t know what’s going to happen today.

You don’t know what’s going to last, what’s lasted.

What’s certain is a bill I have to pay.

Blast it!

Doesn’t anybody know I’ve paid the bill many times over?

What does dissing the latest gizmos,

failing vision,

a wayward leg

mean

but paying the bill many times over,

since they show up my chronic inability

to keep in step?

You say

watch your step, old man.

Even if Ian Anderson stands on one leg

forever, playing his flute, he won’t get rich.

And whatever you say,

K Ayappa Panicker will continue to scratch

his left leg with his right toe

and his right leg with his left toe

while performing the poem ‘The Itch.’

Why should we watch our steps;

Ian Anderson, K Ayappa Panicker and I?

Go take a leap.

Standing on one leg

ever since we learned to walk —

not strutting our stuff —

you can’t on one leg —

but saying it

saying it

was our way of keeping balance.

It was everything else that kept falling like glass around us,

as the world turned,

even as it turns on us now to dizzy us

with its jubilees, its convocations, its throwing of caps in the air,

its blowing of whistles, its hullabaloos, its air-strikes, its wakes,

its multi-legged marchpasts.

(Excerpted from Trying to Say Goodbye, forthcoming from Almost Island Books.)