He wears only sweatpants
beneath that black cloak,
relaxed in the knowledge
that he need not hurry,
that we’re going nowhere.

His colorless scheme of goth
covers bleach-white bones
so bright that if he flashed us,
we’d be color-blind forever,
or at least until he do us part.

The hood isn’t all for show,
its round crown stopping
winds from whistling loose
the crooked, filmy teeth
with which he smiles at us all.

The hourglass of history
sifts out the sands of time
in one of his dingy pockets,
leaving our lumpy lives
exposed like worms to the sun.

And in the other pocket
(next to a piece of fabric lint) —
our signatures written on
indefinite, final contracts
that we never signed.

When reaping grows grim
he’ll place the bucket
we’re all destined to kick
in our dark doorway and bust
out the porch light bulb.

Any day now, he’ll pay us
a visit, wooden scythe snath
rapping towards us like a cane,
his pace steady as change,
as certain as taxes and him.

He’s an elderly everyman,
an old-school traditionalist,
but he fancies himself mostly
a poet for all of the ages,
especially the dark ones.

He writes longhand elegies
in Old English and hard-
to-read cursive, his laments
lengthy as prolonged lives,
noted but rarely applauded.

Though it would only take
one swing of that scythe,
mostly he comes in volumes,
biting our dust not by blade
but by a thousand paper cuts.

————-

Jason Boitnott is a lifelong rural Nebraskan (isolated), family man (lonely), twenty-nine-year educator (insane), and livestock farmer (masochistic). His poems can be found in recent or upcoming issues of Comstock Review, Midwest Review, Shot Glass Journal, Last Leaves, Split Rock Review, Poetry Rabble, and other journals.