His face is a burlap browned shade of weather beaten leather with deeply cut fissures, carvings that tell ancient stories one might read on the hieroglyphics adorned to a cold, cavernous limestone wall

His eyes are amber flickering embers, faded by age to rust, but still simmering in passionate heat, ashes waiting patiently to be stirred and catch flight on the breeze

His arms hang like wrinkled paper flesh, superficially fragile and soft, but blanketing the corded strength of a life worked in hard manual labor, underneath lie veins of iron ore that dynamite cannot touch

His hands frozen arthritically stiff and angular, callused and scarred, the pads of his fingertips a transversely chopped sequoia cross-section of heartwood, loom spun years, spirals of time

His body stooped and gnarled, a stump that lies not true and straight but bent elegantly by the elements, outlasting sunlight, storm, drought, flood, and gravity in everlasting age

His legs shuffling haphazardly, propped up now by a smooth hard cane, unstable crooked stilts, creaking knee joints and scuffed fraying feet, clockwork clicking bones

His mind, brimming full of knowledge locked away in a well so deep it is warped with past memories containing peripheral ghosts of doubts, regrets, and achievements- but outwardly he speaks simply of an easy life steady and long in contentment

His heart, pulsing base drum beats, raw and creaky, near collapse and disrepair, but fully alive and functional in love and happiness, never giving up, fighting every second against the rising specter of death

Fighting for his life

Fighting against time itself

Fighting for me