Losing Track of Time

The childless widower in his third age sits 
beneath the frame of the toy store 
window looking away into the street while 
three Teddy Bears, one in a just-right high 
chair, mourn never being held in small arms.
Long after the twilight has passed,  under the 
darkness of the elevated train platform, he will   
stare, lost in the old street map that once
belonged to his wife, and still not know where 
exactly he is and where exactly he belongs.
Hours later, tired and ready to sleep, he will
stumble home to his old familiar bed and 
his old faded green walls and his comfortable 
brown leather lounge chair, the room filled 
with sixty years of his life and his old familiar
scent and switch on the new flat screen tele-
vision (that replaced his old vacuum tubed 
friend) using the newfangled remote he 
barely knows how to operate.  Next to him,
on the side table, is the silver cell phone 
he forgot to take with him, the one that 
he threw on the frayed golden shag carpet  
thinking it would turn on that light box— and 
then had to frantically retrieve again on hands 
and knees when it started playing Good Night
Irene, and he thought it was his wife finally 
calling to tell him where she was after all this
time gone. He fell asleep missing his lost 
wife, almost the same unwanted sleep as always.  
Except this night Irene would sing to him from 
her sewing chair outside the door frame 
of her old childhood home, the chair fully on the
cobblestone street, she sewing black elbow 
patches onto his favorite red sweater.  He 
would smile at her and would revel in the idea
of using what the teens snickeringly called 
the analog social network of honest conversation.
After a good dinner and some good wine he would 
remember the many times they would argue over 
the important things he no longer remembers, 
the things that kept them both together and yet
apart.  Tomorrow he would go to the town plaza 
and sit nearby but looking away from the fountain 
bubbling behind so high to the sky and so full of life, 
watching the men, women and children whose names he will neither know nor remember strolling
by in the familiar grey, brown and yellow flow— trying to recall the name of that beautiful young women in the sewing chair on the cobblestone streets just beneath the toy store window. 
          
  
  

This is a story poem that I created after looking at a photo essay by Luca Sorato about lonely old people.

https://edgeofhumanity.com/2022/03/24/walking-side-by-side/