The cardboard boxes labeled and neatly stacked contain
what he once thought was the sum of his life:
Birth certificate, marriage licenses, college degree, what he
wrote on legal pads, cut out of newspapers, scraps of paper
scribbled on napkins in restaurants to preserve his great ideas
Boxes of wartime photographs, birthday cards, trophies,
souvenirs, once important files bereft of any meaning, paid for
month after month, year after year, by check and credit cards
seem like a million dollars spent just to squirrel them away in
a 20 by 20 unit in hopes posterity will find his soul in them
The cardboard smells of formaldehyde and dead insects,
those invaders and thieves of everything he’s valued:
photos of grade school friends, the men and women at work,
match books printed with advertising, business cards of strangers
who shared one-time moments in airports on his way to nowhere
The photo albums have become too painful to open and who
will want to flip through them anyway or frame the pictures
and hang them on their walls when there is so much of their
own lives to create and memorialize
He overhears an older man in nearby unit mumble to himself,
“Well, Buster, you cain’t drag a UHaul to heaven”
As for himself he knows it’s true and he knows that what he keeps
in his brain, what he slides out of his unit into the sunlight, holds
the remainder of most of a past he’s left behind and paid double
and triple for in sleepless nights and frantic days
Not worth his time to arrange for an estate sale or to leave in a will
for ingrates who will label it junk and pay someone else to haul
to the nearest landfill and return to the earth
Without a second thought