Unfinished Rooms

If death took the stool beside me,
lowered its glass with sacerdotal calm,
fixed its hollow little gaze on mine
and murmured,

time’s up,

I’d look past its shoulder
toward the door,
then down at the peanut bowl,
then back at that bony bureaucrat
dressed for a funeral
it clearly hoped to invoice.

Pardon?

Whose time, precisely?

Mine is distributed
across several unruly chambers.

In the kitchen, onions wait
beside a knife
with operatic ambitions.

In the hall, one shoe has disappeared
into domestic mythology.

The spare room contains
three abandoned notions,
a mutinous bag of cables,
paintbrushes stiff with old intention,
and a cupboard door
bulging with the private sediment
of a life insufficiently filed.

Death might raise one finger,
thin as a question mark,
summoning its dreary authority.

I’d tell it to inspect the premises.

Plants lean toward me
with chlorophyll accusations.

Apples cling to the tree outside,
fat with unfinished sweetness.

Dogs require adoration
at medically urgent intervals.

Cats demand arbitration,
tributes,
and occasional apologies
for crimes I have not yet committed.

Somewhere, no doubt,
washing lies damp in the machine
developing a philosophy
and possibly a small republic

Besides,

love has not finished
making an absolute nuisance of me.

There is a new child
with milk warm breath
and the whole astonished future
folded inside her fist.

There are faces I have not kissed enough,
rooms I have not forgiven,
letters unwritten,
soup unmade,
wildflowers still plotting
their gaudy insurrection
through the cracks.

My body has been difficult,
faithless in places,
miraculous in others,
yet it dragged me here,
to this ridiculous bar,
where mortality sits beside me
pretending to be management.

So no.

Not tonight.

Let the clock sulk
in its cheap metallic certainty.

Let the glass sweat.

Let death count the crumbs
and reconsider the scale
of its errand.

What would I say
when that final visitor
leaned close
with its cold little summons?

I’d say,

come back when the rooms are tidy.

Then I’d laugh,

because honestly,

that buys me
at least another century.