I recently joined Facebook mostly as a means of promoting my first novel Crossing the Border (available at Amazon in Kindle and Paperback and electronically at other fine book sellers). Immediately I started posting things I had written over the years on different occasions and I expressed excitement at having finally found a home of material that had been sitting forlorn and unloved in my filing cabinet. The lovely Marianne suggested that Facebook was probably not the place where I should grace the world with my unpublished genius. I forget the reasoning, but I considered it sound at the time. As I think about it, she might have said something like “maybe you shouldn’t inflict your doggerel on your friends.”

But now I have a blog! The perfect answer. Visitors will visit if my doggerel and other assorted musings entertains them; I won’t be foisting my stuff on anyone.

Herewith then the inaugural post of verse. I wrote this on the occasion of friend turning 40. At the celebration, I prefaced the reading by noting that the phrase “life begins at 40” was actually the first line of a poem, but that for reasons soon to be apparent the rest of the verse has been lost in the mists of time and only that lone first verse has remained in popular use.

Life begins at forty
A steady slow decline
And even though the day before
You think you feel just fine,
You will soon notice
The ravages of age.
Fading eyesight,
Creaking joints,
A sudden shortness of breath–
Because life begins at forty
The relentless march toward death.