The Unlucky Number

triskaidekaphobia: Can I just say that I like the word for a fear of the number 13?  What a cool word (I'll admit that I had to Google it in order to figure out just how to spell it).

April is not only the cruelest month, and now poetry month, but it's also one of the busiest months for me at SNC. That's because it's full of "occasions" -- honors dinners, undergraduate research forums, celebrating service thingees, literary awards, writing a poem a day. My calendar is a hot mess. Today, I'm slated for two on-campus meals. It's alarming.

I'm taking today's prompt from Jo Bell's document:

A valediction is a poem of goodbye – to a lover, a deceased relative, a situation. ... now write your own. 

*

Valediction to My Youth

Goodbye supple back muscles and hips
rolling liquid in their sockets,
goodbye arches and straight-stacked knees.

Farewell thick hair, shining with chestnut lights,
and glowing, smooth white skin.
See you later flexible, strong fingernails

and fresh clear eyes that scry the type
with hawklike accuracy.
Adieu to dry nights under crisp sheets,

to waking in a moment and leaping out of bed
to stretch a subtle kink or two from an
innocent neck,

adieu to a capacious bladder and comfortable
out-loud sneezes,
and a burning metabolism that like an old furnace

eats the coal of a thousand chocolates
and sucks the belly flat.

Hello, morning wet spot on the pillow,
where dreams of dreams of dreams have melted
everything but doughy rolls of peri-menopausal fat.

Welcome you knots and strains that
cramp and pull at every step and turn.
Come in, you spotty skin and droopy wrinkles,

and dark drowsy terrors in the afternoon --
oh, and nap (you lovely nap), please do fall around me
every two o'clock like an old friend

dropping in for tea and biscuits
with a woolen shawl to keep the chill away
from crumbling bones.

And yes, I recognize you, deep down cold,
bony cold, wet drilling winter infecting each
bent finger -- you are not my friend,

and yet you're with me now more
than memory.