beat the count

Life will give you long, smoky looks. Life will give you lemons, and all manner of lucky numbers. Guess all you want, but you don’t get to know the ending until it is already over. Knocked down and broken, the world gifts you with bouquets and sobriquets, with bruises and stitches and the quiet knitting of too brittle bones. Not dead yet might be all you get, but it means at least you aren’t down for the count. Lay back and let it drift by, struggle up to beat the count. Life won’t wait forever. Another day washes over me, and I feel like laying down.  I lose a little more every day, my bum leg giving out, my blue murder moods gnawing holes in my mind. I have failed too often, lost my place in line. Several sicknesses are on me, and there is no respite behind my eyes. I no longer can even dream sweetly, let alone sleep through the night. Passions have all but left me, haunted only by a few ghosts, and the monster that I was. I know there would be a long sad sigh of relief once I was gone, and wouldn’t hold any curse cast my way against those who despised me. The world wouldn’t be much the worse for my passing, yet I won’t stay down. I don’t do much, but there is no-one to take up my chores once I am gone. No understudy, no acolyte, no heir apparent or other-wise. Just this crummy inheritance and the lilies of the field. Just the meat and bone and the press of air, the fire held and the stars all lost in their travels. Life belongs to no-one,  not to heaven or hell. Even your life is a conspiracy rooted in the beginnings of time, trillions of critters honoring treaties agreed upon before consensus could even be. Legions of ancestors and multitudes of organisms doing all the heavy lifting of existence, beings unknown and strange laboring beneath the fever of your every breath. A crowd of finches feeding on a flowering tree beset with bloom and bee, blessed by this  fecund season. I find my feet, limp along that same old line. My days numbered, no-one counting.