The Absolute of Fewer Tomorrows

How disconcertingly peculiar

it is to confront that visage,

like someone's cruel caricature,

my likeness in a mirror,

only there is nothing to like

and surely its distortion

is very much unlike how

I appear to those viewing me.

But there it is, looking back

at me, never failing to take

me by surprise, alarming me

by the passage of time that

has so inevitably altered my

senses, but surely not my

singular appearance to so great

a degree of visual discomfiture?

Ah, there, problem solved

as correctional lenses filter

my gaze to record accuracy, and

there it is: verisimilitude.  

Yet I am no more comforted

than a child sobbing terror

of the fearful unknown awaking

from a nightmare.  Might it

be the child in me, having somehow

foreseen the abyss of age

surrendering to death...?

Having secreted it in some 

dark, hidden passage from whence

it has been suddenly resurrected

in the looming glowering

absence of tomorrow...?