Self-Portrait with Immortality
I’m bewildered by anyone eager to live fast
given I strenuously object to the idea of dying
young. Ask anyone. I hardly drive the speed limit,
I have never once drunk a cup of coffee, and I believed my mother
when she told me the half-finished cigarette fished out
from the bottom of her dresser drawer was the only one
she’d ever smoked. I love a rule to follow. I’m a sucker
for cautionary tales, except when I watched Tuck Everlasting
in sixth grade, unconvinced by its ham-fisted insistence
on mortality. Yes I’ll be a perpetual wreck (churning out condolence
cards, urns piling up on the mantle) . . . but take me anyway
to the spring at the foot of that great tree.
I’ll lap it up greedily. I’ll lug up the same box of Christmas baubles
year after year. I’ll wear dollar-store glasses
and blow my kazoo at midnight, crashing yet another party
I wasn’t invited to. An old man
once swore to me that if he could return to any age, he’d go back
no further than 48 since only then did he know himself.
Let me live long enough and who knows what I’ll know
at 48 or 148 or 1,048. I’ll hover up to my fuelless treehouse, the sun blistering
my unwrinkled face. I’ll neaten my still-dark bush, chew on whatever morels
I’ve detoxed, and check to see what’s always arriving by mail.
KURT DAVID is a public school teacher and unionist. His creative work has appeared in Foglifter, Gulf Coast, Split Lip, and elsewhere. He lives with his boyfriend in Lenapehoking, Philadelphia.
RON THEEL is a mixed media artist and freelance writer living in Syracuse, New York. His writing and art have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Beyond Words, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and others.
