I’ll never be young again

The title is borrowed, I know,
[Daphne du Maurier, to be precise]
but somebody, in fact many
must have felt this way before.
When any mushy love story
makes you sad and you hum again,
the songs you had sung, hummed
or whistled two decades back.
Peer near the mirror and detect
the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes,
the insubordinate grey hairs
that refuse to lie low. Somewhere
dies the sixteen-year-old in you,
and in its place is born
a tired beast of burden
that keeps turning the treadmill
on creaking joints, protesting bearings
and the path changes from a line to a circle