James Leader: High Talk

Don Juan at Sixty
We’re everywhere … old men
searching for love again,
for that frisson, that shiver,
the universe’s flit-flit-flitter,
that makes the world, for just a while,
bearable, perhaps golden, even divine.
But how hard it gets, after a certain age,
to believe in love as necessary fate,
to take quite seriously
Venus’s elaborate machinery,
her threadbare myths,
when, backstage, you see the curtain lift.
Don’t give in, though – rip the arrow
off the wingèd scornful boy
(who only wants the fresher flesh)
and stick it in yourself
quick, quick …
then feel the glorious flow
from that needle prick.