Retirement 101

Robert Ronnow
Ever Maddening Mandala

Retirement 101

Liberated from collective deliberation,
chaos entertains us. The belief one’s thoughts
can influence the outcome of events.

Limitless choices add up
to the opposite of witnessing
the universe’s birth.

Such ruminations may be tricks of the mind,
this quiet neighborhood may be the default condition,
orderly commerce, the common space, neutral private acts.

It’s a happy anamnesis when my wife and I
chat like regular people. There’s no percentage in
searching for significance.

You can choose silence or speech,
either way
it’s impossible not to participate.

Change is all that’s visible
even after I’ve made my past immutable
and accepted the pains that herald my end.

I’m bone tired of saving
ourselves. I want my afterlife to begin now.
The joy of indifference.

Yep, my morning walk and afternoon nap.
Spring is coughing up some phlegm.
Like an AI or robot come to life

I’m having fake feelings and extraneous thoughts.
There’s no one to say attaboy, you really
solved the case, like Columbo.

I used to put a little poetry in each press release
but Henry said, Please don’t,
clarity and brevity are what the electorate appreciates.

All manpower, no horsepower,
I carried my mother up the mountain in a sense,
leaving her in a nursing home to die alone.

What were the signs she left
for me to find my way back.
Two callow sons of my own.

You can’t put the Spring back into the trees.
I’ve never had a working definition of love.
It’s a dry heat, my wife says.

I want to be not necessarily dead
but deceased. I want to decease and desist,
do less. But when I find I have not much to do

I get nervous. What then.
What now. What to do
when the day stretches forward without measure.