How charming your young breasts. How sweet that you blush, having chosen clothing that reveals still growing concupiscence tightly strapped with skin, glowing in the twinkle of an older eye staring as you turn away, unable to recognise that it’s a wish, an optimism, a pretense that youth can surround pitch and yaw of aged flesh drawn tight around hollows shuttered behind eyes that look away, fearing it may bring the regret of age. But since there is no definite beginning, you cannot point toward what existed the day before the day that beckoned backward thought, where nothing existed the day before but choices, survived, held against the sag of flesh.

Even blood wrinkles as it blotches skin, gross with weight against imagined youth that holds itself as though eternal. It is a pretense, that age scours wisdom into flesh. Each stroke a wrinkle torn into the flush of a lover’s first kiss, close eyed, blinking toward hope.

-- BJ Muirhead