Salesman

He wakes up, cold.

Shifts out of bed,

shirt on, tie tied,

tired.

Cracking teeth brushed after a meagre breakfast.

Two hour commute

in uncomfortable clothes.

Two near crashes.

The car steered mostly by

the bags beneath his eyes.

He’s old now, vision

not quite what it used to be,

his family a shambles,

tectonic plates

shifting further away,

the home in Cold War,

conversations

cross-continental.

Still, he tries his best to work

the same job he’s had for thirty years,

fending off the dreams that were crushed

decades ago,

bitter pills swallowed.

He watches the doctor watch the testing screens,

both of their faces scrunched in concern,

and his ears won’t let him hear the diagnosis,

the quivering lip, in its silence, said it all.

The drive home is a ghost town,

people he used to know all moved on,

all found better jobs in better cities

or had by now lost their lives.

Sometimes he struggled knowing

which ones were the luckier,

hearing their whispers plainly:

We’d have preferred if it was you.

His final act is planting seeds,

two elm trees where

love used to be,

and the past bites at his ankles

with fury and spirit.

He’s worth more without a soul,

he’s worth more devoid of dreams,

worth more abandoned, tossed aside

behind a screen

and he knows it,

mistakes left behind like a breadcrumb trail

a few times along the line

a handful dropped at once,

the root of these problems

untraceable in the mess,

an entire life

living through someone else’s dream.

His final act perfectly logical

in its detached brutality,

the banality of evil

dog eat dog,

at least

he won’t wake up

cold

again.