Soliloquy of an Old Testator

Issue 12

Now almost a Lear!
My feet to be less heated in
the furnace of the circling order
too shallow now
for endurance to go with it,
 
I will revise my complex will
that cuts the dreams that didn't go
up in the smoke. Coherence
restricts time from going downhill,
from going to the dogs.
 
And the beneficiaries, far
removed in every respect from my
generation of patience,
must turn up trumps quickly as I sit
for whatever there is for me,
or I am a victim in my old age.
 
It is true, I can revoke or destroy
or create
another point of desire,
of happiness, of rising, of standing firm.
But who will be wounded, and who
will not be wounded
 
among the larks, among
the jackdaws and the owls that I gave
the world--omne vivum ex vivo?
So go to hell! executor,
with what is written which you
read, which you know.
 
I reared the beneficiaries—three
of them, all males, all muscular, antisocials
(I strongly suspect)!
 
because they said old age is Pandora's box,
 
and that academic life, mine, is now
completely obsolete,
even though its rewards are what they
are waiting to gain.
 
And they hate my library where
I will lie long before I die.
And they yell like demons in slavery
while clinging hard to
Dan Brown, their own crucifix and saint.
 
And two, not one, reside in the East!
PER—MA—NENT—LY!

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Anthony Ogbonnaya Chukwu is a Nigerian poet. He has published "Memphis," and "Corollary," two collections of poems, plus individual works published in different places. 

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