what do old farts know?

What do old farts know?
They sigh and nap and know doctors' names.
The medals on their chests
Are dulled by now, irrelevant and unpolished.
Their skin is as fragile and soluble
As a number runner's betting slip.
What do old farts know?

What do old farts know?
What do they know of getting laid
Or making love;
Of cars that can do zero-to-sixty
In light-speed seconds;
Of children bleeding in dusty streets or
Dying of a hunger that younger men provide?
What do old farts know?

What do old farts know?
Can their whiney prose keep pace
With a present drowning in the
Brilliant scent of unwritten roses ...
Roses old farts may smell as well,
And yet they are too slow, too slow...
What do old farts know?

What do old farts know?
They wait -- sometimes confined by raging confusion --
While younger voices proclaim what they
Too once proclaimed: Death ... the period on
Some sentence that now declines to end.

How contrary to all that was learned before,
To live in an unremitting zone
Where boisterous, spunky periods refuse to work!
Yet even periods grow old and nap.
What do old farts know?