Comparisons add little to our understanding of truth
As for example of youth and old age
There’s no comparison really
Youth is better
Even with its engorgements
Its argyle sweater-vests
Its passions and competitions

Old age has its virtues true
The famous wisdom of the mountain-top sage
Marginally useful to those who intend
To return to the comfortable lowland
Corleone the dulcet don
How to be a man and take a bullet
Again lessons of narrow application

Mostly age is notable for crotchets and maladies
Chief among the engrained caprices
That things were better in olden times
When people used to use words like olden
When things were cheaper and infinitely more practical
Than a device bafflingly contrived to deliver
Commercial announcements to within inches of your very nose

A new world of bafflement
A new state of vertiginous doubt
A world in diametrical conflict
With matters of formerly universal certainty
Like what a sex is
How to make fair play
The proper disposition of a clown

The aches the pains the sicknesses
The complaints of indeterminate etiology
The expert healers who change their minds
With the accelerating seasons
While elders proclaim to their miserable compatriots
I’m showing up
Obsolete and in the way

Cranks whose memory fails
Along with that of everybody else
The first time fascism swept the globe
The last time plague killed the innocent many
The one time we rose to look out for one another
A few dry loaves
A few moldy fishes