Arlene Corwin Poetry

             It All Evens Out

In the end it all evens out:

The small waist expanding,

The flat pelvis stretching;

Titties – voluptuous, gorgeous –

Now long, flat and bitty.

It all evens out.

The soft rounded stomach, flaccid and stout

Between osteo-brittlized hips,

With mouth that was pouting

Crimped into thin lips –

Corners, which used to go up like a child’s

Now drooping and forced into extra long smiles.

Pudenda so furry, fluffy and fat,

Now balding and naked and open and flat:

Oh dear, how it all evens outs in the end.

Who is your friend?

Not body, that’s clear.

Perhaps it’s the growth of maintaining good cheer,

Peering at mirrors the days that are left

While hair carries on losing color and depth:

The even-ing out.

Skin, the organ that’s largest in spread,

Skin that betrays from the sole to the head;

(Hardening sole, scrofulous head),

Face that was downy with brow fine as satin,

Sprouting its hairs from the forehead to chin

[Which, itself starts to grow]

Getting longer and pointier, moustache and beard

Turning her masculine

While a white balding face turns a him to her twin –

Both balanced out, evened up –

And that’s before life’s had its natural stop.

Thin getting fat, fat getting skinny,

Appetites lose their absorptive power;

Bad eaters piggishly gourmand, scour

Dish, glass and bowl, intestines that growl –

And in both new diseases will flower:

A vaginal stinging, a prostate that grows;

Drifts that were common to both

Have a new deathly partner now pledging its troth.

A common denominator binding the old,

(When in fact, we are sold on the myth

That you needn’t get old let alone dead and cold)

Is leveling everything out,

Where the partner is death, the spouse and the lout.

Should every new moment be lived with a sigh

Or stoic acceptance, with no looking back to the youth that was I,

Observing the trudging of time as we die?

Should changing and passing be followed by movement

Unhindered by doubt:

An ongoing thrust and a laugh and a shout?

The jealousy goes when the chum of your of past

[The one that you thought you would die to be like]

Shows up big, bluff and blowsy, (your envy a waste);

Big, bluff and blowsy, and you’re in your prime.

A waste of your envy, a waste of your time;

The worry of youth informed by despair,

Exploded in puffs when the dreams built on air

Were exposed to the truth

That we all even out in the end.

©It All Evens Out 96.9.2/revised 07.12.18

Birth, Death & In Between; Circling Round Woman; A Sense Of The Ridiculous;

I Is Always You Is We; Circling Round Wrinkles; Circling Round Nature;

Arlene Corwin