Tomorrow Man

A bit o' morning poetry to start the week

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I step out the back door

Yeti mug brimming with a latte freshly brewed

And settle into my usual spot 

The rustic table we couldn’t fit inside

Holds the object of my interest

A slab of hollow cardboard

Sky blue ink embossed with shining silver

The pack of Dunhills sits on the edge of shadow

Basking in a ray of sun

As if to say, “The heavens smile upon your desire to feel the embrace of carcinogenic delight”

Always up for a smoke but never a smoker

And yet it’s my third pack since Christmas 

Back in college a friend of mine

A Texan who grew up in Ecuador like landed aristocracy

Introduced me to the brand

“If you’re gonna smoke, smoke the good stuff.”

He was a singer in a swing band

The godfather to my child 

I haven’t talked to him in a dozen years

I light one up and take a drag

The smell, the taste, transport me 

And for a moment I am young and fit and unconcerned

About such trivial omens as 

a Surgeon General’s warning

My beard is not yet gray 

The world is full of promise 

Every path wide open and laden with potential 

So many irreversible mistakes

Not yet made

How can it be 25 years and 90 pounds later

Hypertensive, mediocre at midlife

I’ve barely hit the treadmill in a month

My shirt fits a little tighter today

An homage to a love affair with carbs

I give a bit more credence to the repercussions now

Just not enough to throw the pack away

The slow, subtle buzz crawls into my brain

The coffee pairs and compliments the burn

My toddler comes to sit with, then climb on me

The other children bicker through the window, almost inaudible

I knock on the glass and offer a gentle reprimand

That goes mostly unheeded

A forklift carrying a tree rumbles by

In the nursery behind our back yard wall

A plane flies noisily overhead

Some future version of me

Is not sitting here like this

Smoke wafting from between his first two fingers

He is healthy and lean

Not burdened by his past

Or fearful of his future 

But lives in the present

Mindful and measured

He is not perpetually distracted

Or hunched under the crushing weight of stress

He does not crave the ember-warmth of whiskey

Or nicotine’s velvet caress

He is bold and confident

loving and loved

He does not fight these demons, for they have all been slain

He is present, attentive, alive

His bills all paid on time

The master of his fate

I have never met this man

Because he does not yet exist

He is always the Tomorrow Man

The procrastinated self

The unrealized avatar of

The unmitigated me

For now there is just this

Still lost and stumbling 

Tossed and battered by confusion, loss

Consoled by little fleshly delights

The cigarette has burned low now, down to a stub

The coffee gone, leaving a lattice work of chocolate-colored milk proteins

“Me go inside now!” My little boy intones 

Again and again and yet again, like a mantra; a sacred chant

The breeze blows softly, the last gasps of coolness before

The furnace blast of summer desert heat

It is a moment worth staying in

This liminal space between was and is and could be

Undecided 

Unaccomplished

Ready to welcome Tomorrow Man with open arms

When at last he arrives to claim his throne.