As I get older I find I have a need to have something to do
not to get things done so much as to be doing something
next or now or soon afterwards and then the day runs out
which allows me to complain to myself about all of them
these days of mine and how I must if I may when I can.
It didn't used to be like this back when every morning
I would sit on a large cushion on the floor with a coffee
and an oblong newspaper to look at instead of the clock
this was almost thirty years ago as long as a good marriage
and my teeth were unbroken and I had no sense of time.
As a party trick while others were dislocating their shoulders
or singing backwards in Polish I would announce lightly
that I would die at fifty three precisely and without doubt
not thirty or eighty but the middle age we couldn't imagine
those years of death before its due when life is dull and gone.
Or so it seemed to me then without need to think of a self
that would be consigned as I am to live through this year
said in a kind of rudeness or a joke at another's expense
which I probably specialized in during those empty days.
There is never any going back but there may still be
some movement forward as if in quiet reproof to him
as though a look across the room not seen but made
for while simply living cannot be any sort of revenge
it is after all and as mentioned something to do next.