He didn’t die the first day
He didn’t die the second.
He lived through seven decades
And he thought
That’s it.
I am done for.
But then he lived for five years more.
He began to doubt that he would ever go.

Others were. They took the back door
Suicides
Or the window
They just plain fell out
Through car windshields and
well, they went. Most of them, it seemed, had
closed caskets.

He didn’t see their faces anymore.

And it seemed these deaths were a reminder.
That some day, he’d go too.
But his friends kept on dying,
And he kept on living,
When it seemed that someday soon. He should end.

“I am never going to bite the bullet, am I?”
he asked himself.

“I will be like this forever.”

Growing older. And thinner, and fatter, with wrinkles
all over my loose, paper skin.
Lacerations. And so on. Where I can’t imagine. I can’t
imagine where it will end.
It won’t.
I’ll be like this, but moreso, forever.
And my friends will go on dying, he said, to the closed casket. He looked down at it and he knew he didn’t know who It was. That wasn’t new.