My hair's gone a bit Michael Hestletine

My eyebrows a bit Dennis Healy

Old age that once seemed miles away

Creeps ever closer, yearly

It hasn't crept up on me quietly

Blundered in with its own brass band

This short-sighted view of mortality

Wasn't quite the birthday I'd planned

 

I fell asleep aged twenty,

Woke up twenty-seven years older

I'm turning the heating on earlier now

These days, they feel much colder

The knitwear catalogue on my desk

Belongs to someone else

And my internet history of various ills

Was accrued checking other folks' health

 

The weight that I shed in the summer

Was placed in my own lost and found

The stomach I worked so hard to reduce

Is a little bit nearer the ground

The creaking I hear in the night

Isn't ghosts or ghouls from my books

It's my distant dreams walking out of the door

Along with my once-youthful looks

 

If I bend down to pick something up from the floor

I'm no longer that quick to my feet

Some things don't work quite like they used to

And my thoughts are less tidy and neat

It's a thing to walk into a room now

And wonder just why I am there

And I don't so much sit down to watch the tv

As I do to just sit down and stare

 

Time spent indoors, much more common these days

More anxious than days of my youth

Can be spent counting hairs that are greyer than grey

While deciphering media untruths

Apparently, there is one consolation

My hair and my teeth are my own

Yet somehow that's not much of a comfort

When you find that some memories have flown

 

So, what to look forward to? Can there be much?

Just the quickening onslaught of time

Longing for days when not everything ached

Or dreaming of years in my prime

Or enjoying a new way of seeing the world

While hair now sprouts out of my ears

And hoping to work out the meaning of life

And finally throw off all my fears

 

It looks like my thoughts may have taken a turn

Much darker than I had intended

Yet a sign of my life, I fear, not always shared

There's an awful lot there to be mended

I'm the sum of my thoughts and the things that I've seen

I've made many mistakes on the way

But at forty-seven years and a few minutes old

I'm grateful for every new day.