Dorian Elizabeth Knapp
Retirement
It’s like a permanent vacation you have
to start planning for but never actually
get to take—cocktails in the shadow
of an active volcano, snorkeling
the Great Barrier Reef, an infinity
pool that stretches beyond your
capacity to imagine where the water
ends & the sky begins—as you grind
away at the workplace, whittle your bank
account down to a toothpick,
while simultaneously balancing
a tuba on your head & juggling jars
of aborted fetuses. Okay, maybe that
last bit was unnecessary, but you catch
my drift, or you don’t, in which case,
let me poetsplain it to you: retirement
is a glossy brochure designed to buy us
out of a system most of us could never
buy our way into, & anyway, by then
I’ll be too old to have sex on the beach,
so why bother when one can’t even live
in the present, let alone the impossibly
bright future, which remains impossibly
bright because its purpose is to blind us.