Leprosy

 

I remember youth, the joy of feeling sensations from every passing breeze

the emotions so real, vivid in each moment, always new in their wanderings

 

I still see them  twisted now by time but inwardly they are as strong, if not as vivid.

I still find the mental aims and desires sometimes as strong, if in some preternatural way, unclear

 

But such things happen in life, one truly hopes that no one else would be so afflicted

It is muted but still nightmare as feeling declines and  the knowledge of that is a certain horror

 

For a while after  passions of touch fade and become shadow puppets in the memory,

Where they once moved this way and did that, but truly are only shadows, not life

 

One gains certainty of principle and knows the ways of right and wrong, and laughs

while meeting fate correctly, while unnerved by not knowing what it is to touch it anymore

 

Yet somehow the infinity of this absence causes even that to fade, and become

a mater of certain movements, performed with less acuity, with each passing day

 

Were even trying is a muted kind of nightmare and each mornings much the same

and the clouds inside oneself are gray and mostly placid when one cares to examine them

 

not disturbed anymore by anything one undertakes to feed  or rest or clean themselves

and the certainty of death produces only little tendrils of cloud matter, that have no contact

 

and you may be one of the lucky ones, jeering at my fate, clowning about it. Or like all the rest saying

make do, You are not like me, But did not your parents seem to you some what out of touch

 

with their skins them selves, not feeling something important, thus pitifully innocent in their ignorance

had they fought too many battles, how could such horrid and unknown wars exist, Why were so many others just the same? Without a kind of depth.

 

Did they only  miss something they really should have seen, or do it to them selves somehow , from bad luck or stupidity. Were they a sad enough case you treated them kindly? And humored them?

 

Perhaps you thought that there could be scarcely a worse fate  in some ways and then reluctantly, ( if it is you I describe), decided that their condition was probably better than the alternatives. Maybe,

 

I felt that way and I truly would never wish on you my kind of life. But some of you will it happen to themselves. The others will face alternatives, For I am telling you , I speak not of  some disease but of age.