Sonnets From Other Lives: Ace

He set his watch fifteen minutes ahead
so he could live his forever in the future.
In his mind this gave him an edge.
Would it work? He couldn’t be too sure.
What he wanted was to see the numbers
on the dice, the roulette wheel, the stock exchange.
He wanted to avoid obvious blunders
like auto accidents. It was a strange
conceit & quite irrational he knew--
& he was surprised as anyone
that the premise actually was true.
Everybody else lived his reruns.

But hidden in the fine print was the price:
Each day an hour subtracted from his life.