Old Soldiers

Old Soldiers

This tavern’s walls are nothing like the sun,

The ice is cold, but her lips are blue;

If aging is white, time is estrangement from a son;

Regarding loneliness, this epistle is a view.

Drowning in a lifetime’s lake of drink to forget,

Having seen things that cannot be disremembered,

Kill or be killed, the urge to survive, later regret,

Memory’s power, diluted, twisted, then dismembered.

Taken away before her natural denouement,

Neurons betrayed by time’s corrosion,

Unrecognisable to love, without even a perfunctory dear john,

A monument to life’s brutality, its erosion.

Decrepit now with a pain that is solitary,

Waiting for the end with a heart so heavy, so sedentary.