With just my bus pass for company

 
By Stanley Collymore

I get bored and depressed sometimes, not because
I’m physically ill or there’s anything mentally
wrong with me since I’m fully compos
mentis as any human being can be;
simply that as a widowed person
resident on my own and over the age of sixty there
are those who quite inexcusably assume, either
in their derisive arrogance or a case of rank
stupidity, that with me living on my own
and being the age that I am these two
reasons alone indisputably render
me as someone, who must, of
course, be definitely boring
or otherwise in dire need
of constant supervision
and relevantly, at all
costs, be distinctly
and unreservedly
left on my own.

A situation that is nakedly prevalent nowadays
and quite despondently so that several of us
senior citizens, and regrettably a goodly
number among them that I casually
know, are similarly like me obligatorily and
debasingly subjected to this overbearing
opprobrium and subsequently in such
perturbing circumstances have no
surrogate option, other than to
unenthusiastically succumb.

Naturally prompting the evident question: Why is
it then that other cultures globally and even
some within white Caucasian, western
 societies can succeed in caringly
and ethically looking after their elderly
citizens, something, which when it
comes to the United Kingdom
as well as Northern Ireland
is disgustingly lacking
and totally foreign?

© Stanley V. Collymore
1 November 2019.


Author’s Comments:
It’s not my character, or will it ever be part of my nature, to belabour the disgustingly obvious, since I’m a strong and committed adherent of the worthy and commonsensical principle of not casting pearls before swine.

And with the United Kingdom and its longstanding and likeminded colony of Northern Ireland sumptuously replete with such aforementioned swine, sensibly trying to significantly change such entrenched and worthless attitudes will be as impractical as the Task King Canute set himself of seeking to control the oceanic tides.

So I’ll preferably let my poem eloquently speak for itself!