I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

     A gathering of young men in a bell tower way past our bedtimes.  

     Sneaking.  Sneaking down the stairs.  Sneaking out the door.  Sneaking into the church.  Sneaking up the ladder.  Sneaking cigarettes and beer out of our bags.  Sneaking smoke and liquid into our gullets. 
     Boy, we look so cool.  Sitting in a bell tower drinking and smoking and arguing about whether or not Catholics will be murdered in the streets by the time we die.
     No consensus, btw. 
     But 10 o'clock approaches, and our time has come.  We know the routine.  Last bell of the day: it comes at 10, followed by the 10:02 song. 
     But we sneer at the world because we're prepared. 

9:59:30    All rise. Huddle together. And stick your fingers in your ears. 
9:59:55    Excited glances left and right.
10:00:15  Tension abounds. Unbearable.
10:01:30  They must have been turned off.  But I'm not brave enough to take my fingers out yet, are you? 
10:02:30  Sighs of relief and disappointment ring in the air where belltones should have. 

     A gathering of young men sit back down and nurse our beers.  We looked like boys just then.  3 minutes of impressively boyish posture.  And it was fantastic.
     Never to be talked of again, of course.  What real man admits to looking like a boy?


I grow old...I grow old...

     When I get decrepit I want to do it right.  Like Prufrock, the whiny bastard.  

Another year upon the shelf,
Another loop found on my belt.


"How is that belly coming, old sport?"  I ask myself in the daily toothbrush interview.  Such interviews are the perfect occasions for cliché and hyperbolé because at the end it's all spit into the sink amongst plaque and fluoride. 

     A life measured in coffee spoons.  They tell me the nectar of the coffee bean is unhealthy.  A life measured in coffee spoons would necessarily be shorter than one without them. But how can you know for sure, since your measurements are different? 

     You know how you start thinking about some particular thing and all of a sudden everything you read and hear and see is suddenly alive with the consequences of that thought?  Like if you suddenly decide that every emotion in the world is motivated by violence and then suddenly everything you witness seems to be immensely violent and you only began to realize this for the first time after your thoughts decided to coat the world around you with violence? 
     The beauty of growing old is that as time goes on you get to add more and more of those paradigm-determining-point-of-view-coats to the world before you, and the average shade gets closer and closer to the actual picture. 
     That's all that wisdom is. 

     Man, Prufrock just gets me: a curséd poet if I ever saw one. 
     I look west from my perch in the bell tower and see the sky ablaze.  I long to pay homage to the vista by gifting it to someone else.  But I know, long before I set my pen to paper, that the result will bring human voices and in them my dream will drown. 
     And like he with his muses, I look mournfully at the setting sun and sigh, "I do not think that they will sing to me."