Me Time

image taken by adrian sparks

Me Time

“Retirement: It’s nice to get out of the rat race,

but you have to learn to get along with less

cheese.”--Gene Perret

I am closing in

on becoming a septuagenerian poet

like a barn cat stalking a field mouse,

mostly healed up now

from that horrendous leg wound

I received after falling through

a rotten place on my former deck,

forever the road tripper

haunting blue highways,

while snapping precious photos

of waterfalls, old cars, silos, mountains,

cemeteries, flags, storm drains, and flowers;

creating digital albums of nearly countless images,

when not browsing my gargantuan cinema library

that is stacked floor to ceiling throughout

my spacious daylight basement, holding together

fifty of my friends as a film club,

while expanding my social awareness ten fold,

becoming 

prince of Facebook,

a titan of Twitter, 

still unpublished

but writing more than ever before,

seeking out poets in pubs,

writers in wreaths,

authors in America

and Japan, Germany, France, England,

Canada & Australia

for starters;

remaining forever the dreamer,

a wrinkled obese version of that kid

who wanted to own a small island in Puget Sound,

and create an artist’s community,

a writer’s refuge, 

a poet’s paradise--

still dreaming

even though “reality”  will always fall as short

as an accidental bunt substituting for the slam,

but remembering one dream that did become

reality; the mantle of professional actor,

carving out less than a career from a lost decade, 

always bristling at the raw necessity

of needing to create a separate vocation

in order to pay the bills, angry at being both

classically trained and underemployed,

before staggering hungry into an agency

in Hollywood that was a huge school

for the blind, and blithely bullshitting

my way into a company car, 

an expense account, and

an itinerant position that kept me

out on the righteous road most of the time,

as my plan for a one year hiatus

from the onerous negative energies

that are analogous to an artist’s career,

morphed into the subtle rewards of life 

as an educator, stretching into 35 years 

of service to others, embarking

on a magical mixture of new meaning,

where my theatricality contributed

to becoming a better teacher, lucky

to work with those without sight,

dousing myself in sumptuous decades

while being energized daily

by the palpable and measurable impact

I had on the life of others--

before pouncing on retirement

like a voracious catamount,

tearing open the seals

on my several caches of creativity,

reaping the carefully planned rewards

of finite but limitless Me-Time,

discovering my halcyon days to be

a cuddly cornucopia of thirty flavors

of naked joy,

all poetry, cinema, captured imagery,

and a burgeoning nest of grandchildren.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-Self Portrait

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