What is appropriate in the young makes
What is not appropriate in later years appropriate for them
Ages of life pay their dues to time
Is it the body that counts age and appropriates ideals?
Makes youth intense and mellows age?
Questions of the pituitary gland
Maybe the body ticks time, but can it spawn behaviors?
Mentation, personality, development
Growth hormones dictate our humanity like the lives the three Moerae fated for all humans
Spinning the threads of who we will be
Tied up in bounds of determinism by the pituitary gland
Falstaff and Hal foreshadowing the youthful madcap role I played
In and out of the schoolbooks and classes, such a trope humanity scripted it in Elizabethan drama
Learning lessons of acquiescence in middle-age to gods that held my fate
Metamorphosis of the reading lists of my professors into bosses’ memos
Become pliant, compliant, indeed, obedient, to the machine I used to rage against
I wouldn’t say it was glandular as much as pecuniary forces
That forced me to slog through time in middling age
Chasing my dreams off the ambitious clock
Bouncing through relationships until one remains as if all along it was fate
And now, in arm-chair reflections of it all I ask questions of stories
The storied stages of humanity’s ageless morphology
The taxonomy of the human condition
Authored by us as one glimpse of the whole in the likes of Erikson, the psychologist—
Even the corpus of humanity’s iterations writ large upon our world literature
And I, a person, a representative man, following the trajectories as it seems to me are possible
Narrations of the human genome