Michelangelo’s poem 267 is an anomaly among his late written works. First, it is a fifty-five-line capitolo instead of a sonnet. Second, it does not explicitly take up religion or the salvation of the soul as its subject.1 Instead, we are treated to a long diatribe on the injustices of aging. Other poems from the 1550s utilize imagery of travel and pilgrimage or cry out to God for guidance and aid. Conversely, poem 267 complains about urination, heaps of shit at the artist’s doorstep, flatulence, and the artist’s various failing faculties, from the cricket that sings in his ear all night to the alarming state of his body – nothing more than “bones and strings inside my leather bag.”