Aging And Habits And Addictions Poem by Julia Luber

You get to a certain age, and 'it's all work.'
Just being alive is work. Everything has to be approached
with a practical professional skill. Waking up is a practice,
replete with habit and habit means addiction. Making coffee,
taking medications, killing summer flies, vacuuming-it's all
a system, a work, it's all work. And amidst it, many of our
habits which have become addictions so as well might become
passions. Calm passions. Coffee with the design and colors of
the type you have chosen this time. What the name reminds you of,
and all the connotations of that name. The mind can flood with images
of people you know who have loved this coffee you are now drinking. Or
weirder, or weirder. The father of the identified killer on the morning
you were turning in the profiling to the LAPD, so early in the morning.
Must have been around five or six in the morning. At the place, the same name of the coffee.Habits……..
addictions and some of them have become passions. Somehow, implying
there is a passion amidst this morning ritual of drinking coffee starts to make
the fact that this is all work slightly more intriguing. One could almost think that
this person who writes poems about coffee and vacuuming might actually have a
life in some way or another. Besides just lovers from decades ago, strangely
floating through the mind amidst the habits and addictions.
And why does something feel so right to me- although dreamy, although
one more flight of fancy from my teared up and gasping brain. What a lovely
stain that would be to participate in and actually live in with my habits and addictions.
I might actually feel civilized if I make that the conscious goal for my morning.
Instead of this contemplation on what it would be like to read that author in prison.
That author would have to write an awful lot of books to somehow entertain and keep
me sane in prison. And what does an author construe if their subliminal goal is to be
able to keep somebody in prison somehow sane. Tell me with your most devoted tongue,
your keenly adapted accent, and your most fluid and lushest lips acting gasket to that
tongue that knows no stumble, no stutter rough, no poker face nor pulling and tugging
on an elephat's tusk, no withdrawal from pulling thy witness' bluff- tell me do you ever
think about Puff N'Stuff? That was a character from the cartoons we would gaze upon on
Saturday mornings as children. Yes, near fifty years ago! Can you imagine? Fifty years ago!
Take it slow…….remember, this poem started as a testimony on aging. Okay, so perhaps
I was staging a beginning to some kind of nervous breakdown through which I could
ring my mantra round and about the town. I am accused of having a secret agenda.
Let me ask- -are you part of the conspiracy? Should I be worrying that you are aging thee? That you are writing perhaps in a gossip columnist's somewhere that graying somehow suits me…..it goes with me: you have circumnavigated around your pen.
I am now about a breath and an Ahem.That sex is strong. It lasts long.
Even through the chaos and trauma of aging. And the next move the political
parties are staging. To war against each other in a conspiracy. As if I am
controlled by them, and them by me. And it is who sits between us about which we can all
suddenly agree.