Celebrations

Hobbling across wet cobblestones, I look sideways and fly headlong into the mirror that curtly sums up my face, and calls me that name, the one you used to used.

Earthen faces dry up around my ears as they pass, spouting their gospel, wearing their ribbons. It's all so obvious and callous. Rain has been kind to me; all my convictions washed away years ago, in the nineties - or the eighties. Nothing left to stand on anymore, just this battered leg, bursting with muscular pain, just like the angina again. There goes the chest, again. They might as well pin a ribbon on - it'd hurt all the same, and mean just about as much.

I wonder what will burble from my lips when I am old, what anachronistic diatribe will send my tongue flopping about, slapping the sides of my mouth and grinding along the teeth, barely spitting with razor blade sincerity, words forming and jutting forth and drying up in the air, next to the ears, flitting away with the vapours.
Not something worth a damn, I hope. No one will listen. I used to yell louder than bombs, and no one would come running. Now they come running and await my every word. They stand outside the doorstep and I reject them with a smile, and a lie. I say so many things, and they cling to it, and repeat it, and they say such things that you could never repeat.

They were not there when the words were worth being heard - so what made the switch? Where was the trick? Was it the lies? The quiet? They will soon realise it is all a trap, all a veneer, and they'll notice my broken leg and lie down for me while I step over them quietly and drift away into the background.