Here I Am

Here I am

getting on for seventy

and never having gone to work in ladies’ underwear

Never run naked at night in the rain

Made love to a girl I’d just met on a plane

At that awkward age now between birth and death

I think of all the outrages unperpetrated

opportunities missed

The dragons unchased

The maidens unkissed

The wines still untasted

The oceans uncrossed

The fantasies wasted

The mad urges lost

Here I am

as old as Methuselah

was when he was my age

and never having stepped outside for a fight

Crossed on red, pissed on rosé (or white)

Pretty dull for a poet, I suppose, eh? Quite.