This Brief Flicker Was the Whole Damn Miracle By BR Wilson Guitars & Cigars, The Bipartisan Patriot.

This Brief Flicker Was the Whole Damn Miracle

By BR Wilson Guitars & Cigars, The Bipartisan Patriot. 

I stand now at the crooked edge of the yard,

like an old dock post still refusing the tide.

New England dusk rolling in cold and blue,

smelling chimney smoke, wet leaves, stale coffee,

the whole damn world settling into another October like an old union laborer lowering himself into a barstool.

Funny thing about getting older.

Nobody hands you wisdom.

That’s greeting-card horseshit.

What they hand you

is loss in slow installments.

My knees sound like an early-evening fire stuffed full of dry pinewood, 

snapping and cracking every damn time I stand up.

Doctors suddenly know your first name.

Half your friends got cholesterol numbers that read like lottery jackpots.

The other half are dead.

Real uplifting stuff.

When you’re young, you walk around believing life’s got unlimited refills.

You waste whole Saturdays angry about traffic, politics, some idiot at work microwaving fish in the breakroom.

Then somewhere past fifty, maybe sixty if you’re lucky,

the realization finally punches through the drywall:

This ride ends.

No appeals process.

No extension.

No customer service desk.

Just you, the clock,

and whatever crumbs of grace you managed to notice while running around acting important.

That’s the son of a bitch of it.

The world becomes unbearably beautiful

right when you realize you don’t get to keep it.

Morning coffee suddenly tastes sacred.

A porch light glowing through fog feels like poetry.

Even hearing your old dog snore beside the chair

can hit hard enough to damn near crack your ribs open.

You start loving ordinary things with unreasonable force.

The cold air.

Your wife’s laugh from the kitchen.

Cheap whiskey with an old friend.

The stupid familiar roads full of potholes Massachusetts apparently preserves as historical landmarks.

Whitman would've laughed at us, I think.

All these loud proud Americans marching around like immortals

while the reaper quietly sharpens his shovel behind Dunkin’.

Still...

there’s beauty in finally understanding it.

A rough dignity to it.

Because the old man, broken down and swearing at his lower back,

finally sees what the young man never could:

This brief flicker was the whole damn miracle.