Max Coots

It’s the little deaths before the final time we fear.
The blasé shrug
That quietly replaces excited curiosity,
The cynic-sneer
That takes the place of innocence,
The soft-sweet odor of success
That overcomes the sense of sympathy,
The self-betrayals
That rob us of our will to trust,
The ridicule of vision, the barren blindness
To what was once our sense of beauty –
These are the deaths that come so quietly
We do not know when it was we died.

from Seasons of the Self