Posthumous

This is a POEM in which the artist considers what his life's work will amount to after he's dead, comparing it all to a sea shell.

A jack of all trades is what they'll call me.

Those who bother to pick up my remains
will hold in their hands a painting,
colorful and abstract;
a poem of decided obscurity, dismissed too early;

a short, incomplete story.

They'll say "he never amounted to much
in his lifetime.
He worked at a coffee shop and may have
suffered from a mental illness."

I'd really be somebody
if their inquiry went so far
as to report on the life of my parents
or my conception of romance.

I've never been that good at math;
from all the shapes and words and philosophy
I leave behind, this will seem too obvious to mention,
if I were somebody.

But if they look from a distance
at all the trades I fell for
and where I chose to say
what I was incapable, as just a man,
to say out loud in a word,
or single act, or opus,

they might as well have plucked
a shell from the beach,
saw inside a spiral,
perhaps held me to their ear
and listened to my moan
and how I tried like hell
to be the entire ocean.