Selling Short

The winter wind’s a shot across your brow,
An addend to the sense of deficit
You wrestle with inside the here and now.
You’re happy only in the preterit

Or future tense—because you hate the cold
And you believe a sleight of handy grammar
Can save you. Face it, man: You’ve gotten old,
And soon enough the unforgiving hammer

Of time will smack you down. Although you knew
Already that a reckoning was coming,
You stayed the course as if you had no clue
How soon you would instantiate the dumbing

Down and the other mortifying states
That you are heir to. Drowsy sheep accept
What’s given, letting gods control their fates,
Though God himself has often seemed inept

At neutralizing existential pain.
You fear you’ll die with dreams still unfulfilled
Like everybody else, and you’ll complain
Until at last your diaphragm’s been stilled.