The poem’s engine is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is more interesting than it first appears. David lists a halving sequence — 72, 36, 18, 9, 4.5, 2.25, 1.125 — sums it to 142.875, and calls the result perfect. The sum is correct. What the poem does not say, and what a reader with a pencil will find, is that the series converges to 144. Halve forever and you gain exactly one more lifetime. Never two. The dream of endless renewal, worked out honestly, yields precisely double and stops. Whether David intended the limit or stumbled onto its edge, the poem lands one term short of it, at 1.125, which is the last number a person could still be bothered to write down.

Before the math, the complaint. The opening catalog is deliberately undignified: tossing and turning, midnight grilling videos, the john, the spider on the wall, and a one-word line that refuses all decorum. “Fart.” Placing that syllable alone after “an undeniable urge” is a joke about biology’s indifference to poetry, and the poem is better for making it.

The technological middle is where the piece shows its author’s hands. A Zerk fitting is a grease nipple, the small hardware a mechanic uses to lubricate a joint, and reaching for that specific term rather than a generic one tells you the speaker has actually greased something. Set beside Neuralink and the GPU brain, the poem builds its cyborg out of one part shop manual and one part press release. The sleep switch toggled to OFF and the muted stomach are wishes anyone past sixty has entertained; the Zerk joints are what make them his.

Then the poem turns, twice. First the concession: “Some nights I like dreams / fantasies dancing / on the ceiling.” The man arguing that sleep is waste admits he’d miss it. Second, and stranger, the long unpunctuated passage about veins. Blue and red streaking under the skin, “creating new pathways / of sustenance,” a body that “builds the future / regardless of / the age.” That section abandons the wry voice entirely and reads as something noticed in a mirror and not yet processed. Its syntax loops and doubles back — “the age / inevitable / of age” — which is what unprocessed observation sounds like.

The close does real work in seven words. Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead until observed; the speaker’s cat is unambiguously purring; and the pencils, worn down by writing, echo. The final image is a man measuring his remaining life in pencil lead, which is the same unit the poem has been counting in from the start.

The best comic writing in this batch, and the comedy is structural rather than decorative. The poem sets up a genuine complaint, escalates it into an absurd engineering request, then does the math on its own wish and finds a number. Reaching for a geometric series in a poem about mortality is an unusual move, and it works because David plays it straight — he adds it up, laughs at himself, and moves on. “Purrfect / as I nap” undercuts the whole calculation in four words.

“Fart” as a standalone line is a small act of nerve. So is Zerk, which most readers will have to look up and which rewards the lookup.

The last third is where the poem loses its footing. The vein passage is the most emotionally interesting writing in the piece and the least controlled — it runs twenty-two lines without punctuation, doubles back on its own phrasing, and arrives at Schrödinger without a bridge from what came before. Something real is happening there, and it deserves either a firmer edit or its own poem. As it stands, a reader who has been laughing for fifty lines has to change gears with no warning and no handrail.