Tell Your Dead I Said Hi

I’m reading the obituaries again,
scanning a family’s loss, greedy
for the details, the dirt
it’s not the gossip I’m after so much
as it is the hows and whys of death
cancer, overdose, suicide?

They say the lucky ones die
of old age as if time is always
a gift; sometimes time
is a noose, ever tightening—and the urge
to escape it is a line in the sand.

I’ve never crossed it, though like any boundary
the urge to press up against it rises within me—
the overflow of that furious sadness
threatening to break its container

so, no, I don’t blame them,
the ones whose choosing to break
may be no choice at all

I linger over their condensed stories
and sip my iced latte, the condensation
trailing down the glass, a watermark already
forming on the stained wood,

my passing presence contained
in the familiar circle that briefly
overlaps theirs