Deathwatch

I thought being old was child’s play,
no more painful than grey hair;
“It’s nothing” Dad would wince and say.
Perhaps he knew I didn’t care.

Dad’s age when he died, I’ve long known
how wrong I was: joints swell and twist
at knee and ankle, shoulder, wrist
where raw bone grinds against raw bone.

Like him, I’ll hide pain, face as ashen,
pretend I bend to tie my shoe.
Now bowels don’t suggest compassion:
bloody flare-ups strip their screw

as IBD, COPD
join OCD – yet nerves feel free
and fit to highlight every pain.
But memories cloud, names fall like rain.

All his family who’d died
would slip my older brother’s mind
till prompted by the dim-but-kind.
I can’t forget the way he cried.

Mnemonic more than lyrical,
rhyme’s how I wind my way through age,
science’s great miracle:
prolonging life in its worst stage.

The deathwatch in me rocks and ticks,
a tethered beetle’s spellbound tread
around its twisting maze of thread
and, like my twisting bones, it clicks.

Concertina wheeze of lung,
labyrinthine cramp-struck guts,
unwinding mind . . . no ifs, no buts,
I’m only glad that I’m not young.