Sobering

It comes at last, this knowledge,
Not with a blow
But like a letter misdelivered
And still read through.

How little you have counted.
How faint the mark,
A tremor lost at once
In wider water.

The years arrange themselves.
Friends vanish politely.
Illness takes a chair,
Settles in.

Children do not call.
The post brings offers,
Shiny, impersonal, addressed
To someone like you.

You read them.
There is time for that now.

Emails arrive, uninvited reminders
Of interests once claimed.
You read those too.
There is time for that now.

Channels blur.
Faces talk.
Nothing is meant for you.
Time is passed.

The clock, inherited,
Keeps at it.
Three in the morning
Finds you awake,
Mind busy with nothing useful.

Morning comes.
Coffee.
The news rehearses its familiar crimes.
Only the names alter.

Another stiffness.
Another appointment,
Neither feared nor welcomed,
Just endured.

You wonder whether absence
Would register at all.
If you faded gradually,
Would anyone notice
Before the payment failed?

They say, be grateful.
A few still care.
Once you believed there were many.
You were wrong.

Work thins out.
Hours shrink.
The gratitude never arrives.
Neither does regret.

You keep going.
Habit is good at that.
Hope lingers, out of practice,
Knowing its chances.

Then memory plays its last trick.
You recall the old
You once dismissed,
Their talk of being overlooked.

And see, without surprise,
That you are one of them now,
Still standing where you stood,
Having tried, and failed,
To matter more.