The Rest Of Your Life

Day one of the rest of your life
is not without its ups and downs
both of which you might expect.

The house begins to get tidier
(maybe that’s a consequence
of diversionary therapy
or displacement theory
operating on your psyche).

You clean up the messes that you can clean up,
which means the kitchen table is cleared
of a broken modem and unopened envelopes
mostly bills, of course,
and copies of The New Yorker
you never had the heart to read
because … well basically because
The New Yorker is way too optimistic
for a man who leaves his telephone bill
unpaid, his energy direct debit unopened
and his superannuation account
unexamined, although you could
attribute that reluctance to the collapse
of early-period 21^st Century Capitalism
at the fag end of the Bush years:

Yes we can! Yes we can!
It’s just that in some areas, we don’t.

You install software that’s been lying
close to your computer for quite a while
and you configure the programme
in ways you normally don’t bother
(reading the manual with attention to detail).

Some e.mails go unanswered.
Others, you put on a bright face,
learning how to use smileys on Skype,
which is a skill you never imagined
you’d acquire. And much to your surprise,
you learn about gravatars but don’t pick one.

Phone calls can be dodgy, if you take them.
You thinks it’s day one of the rest of your life.
Everyone else thinks it’s nothing more
than Saturday morning. So you have to put them right,
which can come as a bit of a shock (to them
because they’re in something like mild shock
but not wholly surprised;
while you’re aware you have to go over it again
and again and again.) But that’s life
on day one of the rest of your life.

Day two promises to be interesting
But we’ll get round to that tomorrow.