TOAST: Old Age Poems

Continued from Monday

On Aug. 19, 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 5847, declaring Aug. 21 as National Senior Citizen’s Day. This date was proclaimed World Senior Citizen’s Day by the United Nations in 1990. To mark the occasion, I have here a new series of sonnets with aging as the central theme. I call it “T.O.A.S.T.” or “Timeworn Old Age Senior Tales” for Senior Citizen’s Day.

Hippocampus Hiphop Heralded
 
Hippocampus hip hop? Well color me curious yellow
hyped up at a RIP pit stop for a rare rest stop in hell
locations in the gray matter more and more mellow
when memory processing leaves us forever is hard to tell.
 
In the hippocampus on the banks of the corpus callosum,
the river inside our cranium that always flows two ways,
on a boat afloat in membrane mist just gotta tell you some
ride this ferry crossing mirth filling memory between bays.
 
Stuck on synaptic sandbanks electric charges blow their siren
as far as memory is concerned my recall is getting much shorter
and millions of those interstitial axions just keep right on a firing
storing stuff in memory banks along the ridged hippocampus border.
 
Hip hop, non stop, flip trip, flopping along, rap coming on strong
yesterday, today, and tomorrow memories all humming along.
 
Old Age Rap: Freestyling Smiling and Beguiling
 
Time for an old age nap, so I’ll shut my trap. but before I go,
a little freestyle rap from Uncle Joe. now you know, lets grow,
together on sunny days and in rainy weather, uh oh on a hotdog roll,
gotta get it off my heart and soul, trying to make sense of the whole truth and nothing but, sometimes rude, at times uncouth, from beleaguered brain
to instinctual gut, gotta dance, have to punt, waltz with the winners,
stop over eating at buffet dinners, stay up in front, fall behind, fall back, keep stealing bases, keep running for home, among philosophers East to West I roam, and put my thoughts in a doggerel poem. I like freestyle rap like this, sometimes I hit, sometimes I miss, from my corpus callosum
 a little kiss. peace and love has to come from below the amygdala to above the cerebellum, just gotta tell ’em, not yet senile inside the cranial membrane need I explain, as my memory drains, someone calls out to me, Hey Pop !
looks like its about time for me to stop this freestyle hippocampus hip hop.