Mortality Has Its Disadvantages

If you are painting the window sills
for instance, or writing the Great
American Novel, or selling the Porsche
you can't afford, or would like to
change your wardrobe after six
years or so, you don't want to be
interrupted.

Left alone for the next eight hours,
I stroll south and a little west. The
weather has turned threatening,
the sky a silver gray coffin color,
metallic looking, with no depth,
shallow like my remaining time.
Moody.

But not me. There is a touch of
adventure in me as I step, if not lively,
then deliberately, down to the neighborhood
car dealer, Casey's, who has the occasional
interesting merchandise. Not today. They're
shifted, like the grocer putting the older bread
up front.

I'll be cremated to save grave space.
It's no longer funny to say I'll be buried
in my Porsche or Alfa Romero. I slip home
as the rain starts, thinking not of cars but
my children and the sweet wife who
tolerates me with such equity. I prefer
life.

The trick is to visualize completed projects.
Some visits with family to regenerate connections.
Find the damn leak I created when the
roof deck was built thirteen years ago.
And the book; is it worth anything? Is
this sense that I'm on to something
real?