Day 11

1.
I am old and you are new,
because I like rainy Sundays and naps on the couch
and you want to be out riding rollercoasters,
which are fast and furious,
too fast for my taste, I want to stay
surrounded by all the things I love, whereas
you want to leave it all behind,
and we don't understand each other,
not really,
not well,
still there is a time when I invite you into my home
and with you on the threshold and I inside
we are both briefly happy,
holding hands at the edge of something new and old,
but it is too short for me
too long for you
the one who would catch a bullet train to Paris
with nothing but the clothes on your back and
a light in your eye, and I the one waiting
on the couch my mother bought
in the house I'll live the rest of my life,
if luck is kind,
a fate you would call a prison,
full of jailhouse mirrors which would reflect the dust
settling deep in your hair,
turning it gray instead of black, the color
of a moth-eaten vulture
like the one sitting in the attic, biding its time
glass eyes brighter than mine,
you said with cruelty --
"the world passes you by,
bright, beautiful, and you are unchanging stone,
and I cannot be with you,"
who knows which day that was, all the
ones you returned to my doorstep
hungry for permanence
which I have in plenty,
and the funny thing is how you do, too,
perhaps more than I
permanent in your impermanence,
you always come back.