Good Night and Almost Thirty

by GERALD WEALES

I’M not old; no Teiresian wrinkled dugs for me,
No dotage; I still make sense, time, passes.
Yet Nestor sings in my blood, not Diomede,
When I face classes

Full of eighteen is a go-to-hell age
When sin is still so new it holds surprises,
When expectation sitting like a mother hen
Keeps warm surmises,

When laughter has its birth in secret warmth,
Not in that surface mine, sophistication,
Before the toy of childhood, hope, gives place to
Determination.

Though I’m still on the go, the town, the make,
And not one mortal coil of mine is shuffled,
When I look into still unknowing eyes,
I’m sadly ruffled.