Decline
Decline - meaning Summary
Facing Physical and Moral Decline
The speaker registers personal and cultural decay in a short, spare meditation on aging and loss. A private ritual—smearing sesame oil at morning—becomes an emblem of diminished vitality and past bravado. Memories of fights and laughter give way to numbness, fatigue, and an ominous inner presence. The poem widens to the collapse of cities and the rotting sky, collapsing personal decline into a bleak, shared mortality.
Read Complete AnalysesNaked along the side of the house, 8 a.m., spreading sesame seed oil over my body, Jesus, have I come to this? I once battled in dark alleys for a laugh. Now I'm not laughing. I splash myself with oil and wonder, how many years do you want? How many days? My blood is soiled and a dark angel sits in my brain. Things are made of something and go to nothing. I understand the fall of cities, of nations. A small plane passes overhead. I look upward as if it made sense to look upward. It's true, the sky has rotted: It won't be long for any of us.
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