And so you should fall like a butterfly with burning wings.

Here is the orchestration, notice as the music swells,

A little wave here, a minute crest there,

Then culmination, the peak, nothing near a tidal wave, but worth mentioning to others,

Once, before you crash into the currents below.

Your life is a movie.
Your voice is a soundtrack; your movements are the score.

To the cadence of years roaring past, make your peace.

To the rhythm of your heart as it weakens.
With each step, you breathe.

With each injection, fire is diminished for a moment, but not for a moment more.

And so you should fall like a butterfly with burning wings.

We’re getting older, though perhaps no wiser, as we look at these houses all around the block (any block - they're all for rent and for sale), as we jot the numbers down or call as we drive, and we think that this yard would be perfect for a garden, or that window would be excellent for the cats, or the dip in the ground might be the best place to build a koi pond. As we wonder if the stairs will creak, or if the chimney leaks, or what color paint best suits the mood of the walls and the sills.

We lean attentively as friends interview on the television and radio shows, marking tracks as they're broadcast in three hundred and sixty degrees, and in a dome throughout the skies. As they remind us of what motivation can bring you, and talent; of which we have little remaining, if we ever had an ounce at all. This is the new plight, to watch as they launch themselves into independence.

And what do we do with this, when people tell us that they want to die? Surely we haven't forgotten, surely it hasn't been so long since the discontent, the misery surged like life throughout the veins. Surely it hasn't been so long that we can't recall what it was like to feel nothing short of the cries of angels falling into the sea, flown too close to the sun, what it was like to feel the knife on the skin as we drew the blood to make sure that we were still alive... so that we could feel some thing, any thing, that could be temporarily pasted to the Real, that could be a moment of tangible, physical agony (as opposed to the other kind, the mental torture of knowing, or not knowing at all). What do we do with this, now, as we lean a little more, as the humidity of spring makes itself known in our joints, in our bones? Ah, for we are old souls, we have seen this all before, and bored, we push it all away - hoping perhaps, in time, to conserve a little something left of ourselves that we have yet to surrender to the endless tide of days.

And so we give, again, more than we should, though the gifts of the old are all too often neglected, or forgotten, or simply just taken with the expectation that there will always be something more - but all things are finite. All things, such as a soul, can run dry. So this is how it is, to realize. So this is how it is, knowing the reality that all things die.

We make ourselves content with the little things, then; we wash the car by hand, detail the trim, polish the chrome, and we pass along another fraction of a day. We purchase bowls and whistling teapots and language lessons and we write stories that are thin, the metaphor shining through, failing at this, even. 

But we know that it ends, and that amounts to something, doesn't it? That it ends, and wisdom comes somewhere in between, where we ponder if it is the thought, the action, or the intent, or a culmination of the three, that makes for factoring, for delimiting the wise. So we are not as we think, we are not as we feel, we are not as we see the world around us; we are merely the trees, lost to and at the mercy of the interpretation and analysis of an observer. We attempt it all, and we inevitably fail, for this is a human condition... and yes, it is possible that all of us were trained, programmed to be this way.  And we know that we are older, that youth is slipping between the lines; we are older, and this saddens us all.

It is a terrible thought, if we were to die.