sketch for a new poem.

I once knew a boy whose beauty was rooted in his youth. He was blonde and sincere, with rosy pink cheeks, newly shed of his baby fat. Dewy and fresh in appearance and demeanor.

He grew of course, into a man with an angular face and a stern expression.

When I look at his pictures I see the passage of time. I see, very clearly, the movement from youth and wonder to age and - perhaps wisdom or perhaps a kind of guarded skepticism a way of walking through the world that carries with it the scars of a sudden awakening.

I don't know what any of it means - don't even understand the feelings he provokes, I only know that when I see the face of the man, in this case, I see no trace of the boy and I wonder how that can possibly be.

He has darkened. His bones have hardened,
into ways and shapes, frames and structures
I never thought possible.

Old men sometimes spring, fully formed from the cowlicked foreheads of handsome blonde boys
barely out of puberty,
they leap into being
with no previous experience
no memory at all
of what might have been.

an attempt to post a video

This won't work on Facebook so let's see if it will work here.