Up Close and Personal in Three Poems for March: 'Kicking the Tires,' 'The Shape of You' and 'Food for Thought'

 

According to Anne (my wife and best critic) my poems in Verse-Virtual this month are unusually personal. One is a poem not only on the universal subject of getting older, but also on how it “shows up” -- especially in inconvenient places (like one's face).

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for including "Kick the Tires" (the poem about aging), "The Shape of You" (about someone very close to me), and "Food for Thought" (about food).

I'll post the one with most immediate relevance -- the poem about aging and appearance -- here. And also, see note below, because this (as we say in the newsy trade) is an ongoing story.

Kick the Tires

Most guys of an age, let’s face it (or maybe let’s not) 
grow thick and long in the tooth 
and are thinning up top 
Others, the ones that work out, stand forth 
like steel sculptures, shiny skulled, at senior events,
rusting in spots
 
To send even a ‘recent’ photo,
I mean, not yesterday exactly,
with my missing tooth and the cyst burning 

     like a red tower
in a wasted portion of the kingdom 
of the phiz…
but the day before, or the day before that,
may perhaps be regarded as an indulgence 

     in ‘paint to sell’
I prefer to believe I have let them, my correspondents, 
down easy
 
Oh, and for the record,
I am working on getting thick, and bald, 
and generally not so spruce
It’s coming along
And yet, to send a photo only-a-few-years-back,
can it be so misleading?
I mean, I think (though I can be corrected)
I still clean up pretty, sort-of
until you kick the tires 
 

Here's a quick postscript update on the "the cyst burning

like a red tower"

on face mentioned in the poem above.

After four visits to doctors' offices, it turns out

to be skin cancer.

To see the other 2 poems, and find new work by seventy

other poets go here:

Verse-Virtual

https://verse-virtual.org/2022/March/knox-robert-2022-march.html