Metamorph

The mirror bothers me, it stares back with silent mockery;
The years are catching up and my face is showing its wear.
Youthful days do not feel so long ago, but they are
distant and blurry, archaic moments half remembered.
Lines are building where they should not be, crows feet,   
frown lines, those little bags under your eyes that stay longer
and longer.

My body betrays me at every turn, like a rusting machine
left out to lay in an open field, it creaks and cracks
as the wind blows, announcing its infirmity to the world.
Gears grind and motion sputters, sending sparks of welded
pain through frame and junction. This beautiful artifice,
precision engineered, now brittle with frantic overuse.

I've changed, but not changed- I still feel so much of what I was,
but muted to adjust to the rigors of adult metamorphosis.
Unwanted concerns caccoon me like sticky mucus,
pointless responsibilities and cloying expectations
are the silken strands that constrict and bind my raging soul,
underneath the skin I feel the bones reform,
and I wince.

I still remember the volatile madness of youth,
its irreverent chaos and aimless self-destruction;
the passionate hurricanes that swept though me-
tornadoes of anger and thunderstorms of rage,
their uncontrollable fury scarring the landscape
of my psyche, my body, my being-
and laying waste to fragile foundations of aspirations.

Such were the tectonic forces of despair and solitude
that wrenched my heart to its current fractured form;
the cometary collisions of unrecognized invading detritus
that have cratered and pockmarked it nearly beyond recognition.
Yet ,though dormant at times, my volcanic intensity has burned-
cleansing the past formations, renewing corrosive erosions,
recycling and reinventing- desperately renewing what was broken.

But I fear the inner fires are cooling- like a dying planet,
my  radioactive core will decay and radiate its heat
into the empty entropic vastness of society, leaving its
record of tumults like open sores unfixed, gaping upon a frozen
cinder world moving in uncontrolled orbit, shackled by gravity.

I will against this parasitic invasion, but like the tide it comes.

And still so many unfulfilled desires and fever dreams fill
my head, so many things to do and be and see, but tick-tock
the clock will one day stop, and where will I be?
How much left undone, unsaid?

Why so fleeting, the gifts of youth, so directionless and miscarriaged?
At least to me, so I pity, at least to me.

This the mirror says to me, the face that stares back with silent mockery.