CHANGES by W.C. Wampler

 

 

 I stood outside The Acoustic Café on a hot Bridgeport night in September,

where my music and poetry are well acclaimed, but render me no legal tender.

A beggar approached, and I could see in his eyes, his question before it was asked.

Deep in my mind, unknown to him, a different me was unmasked.

In the seconds before he spoke, he loaded his face

with his hungriest, ‘world is against me’ frown.

Walt Whitman’s words to give alms to all who ask,

 already had my money pocket hand reaching down.

 

“Mister, can you spare some change?”, he asked, like that would be fair.

“Oh yes,” I thought, quite to myself, “you can have all my gray hair.”

 

I’ll loan you all the new gaps in my teeth, and the wrinkles I’ve come to dread,

and you certainly are welcome to the spreading baldness on the top of my head.

 

You’re welcome to the bitterness I’ve accumulated over the years.

You’re even welcome to my diminishing capacity to shed sympathetic tears.

 

You can have, if you can take it, my growing difficulty, to keep myself in shape.

You can take my adult recognition of futility, and bureaucratic red tape.

 

You can have some of my ‘persistent old self’, that replaced my ‘gung-ho kid’.

You can have my increasingly aggravating regret, for all I never did.

 

You can have the change that’s come over me, that makes life look like a joke.

I suppose you don’t care for the changes in my body, that make me a middling poke.

 

You can have my arthritis, you can have my bad knees, and my blurry eyes too.

You can have my broken heart, my cynical mind, and my ‘still so much to do.’

 

All of this ran through my mind so fast, he didn’t even have time to repeat.

I saw myself from a distance, hand him three dollars and say,

“Get yourself something to eat.”

 

I turned and walked into the cafe, where my retrospective poetry was due,

and I chose a few pieces about living to the fullest, and some of the changes I’d been through.

 

From the stage I could see the beggar, outside the front door, money still in hand.

I wondered if somehow he had heard all of that. He seemed to understand.

 

Then as I spoke, a reverberating voice echoed all through me, about the price just live.

  “The changes of aging are just a part of it all, and better than the alternative.”

 

 

w.c.w. 9/oo7