If you don’t finish Wordle, does it count as a loss?

Does the incomplete word hang over you,
a partial subtitle to your tragicomic life?

Is it the entirety of your unauthorized biography,
the shortest and least readable tell-all ever?

Will it have been ghost-written by old Mrs. Hasselback,
your fourth-grade teacher who claimed she liked you,

but who never confessed your genius aloud
when you most needed your parents to hear it?

And what if you don’t find joy in the snow?
Will you never wear boots, even if you need them?

The idea of cold, wet toes will keep you shut in,
until your father forces you out into the cold

with bread sacks between two pairs of socks,
your too-tight shoes constricting blood flow,

and you still arrive to school with cold, wet feet,
plus the shame of yeasty and crumby toes.

If you don’t forgive him, will you go to Hell?
Will you arrive there wordless and barefoot,

unable to defend yourself to Satan’s legal team,
who hold their narrow noses high in the sulfur air

and look down in feigned patience at you, forever
scorching feet across coals as if it could save you?

How were you to know that the smell of baking toes
would be such an offense to old Lucifer himself?

Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word, 
except ironically enough, that single unfinished wordle,

which looms like the executioner’s swinging blade,
counted to you as the ultimate, damning loss.
                        

"People were always getting ready for	
tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. 
Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. 
It didn’t even know they were there."
—from The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The day came and went, and no one even noticed,
as though lightless sunrise led directly into sunset
and nobody looked up wondering where Tuesday went.
Tuesdays didn’t matter to anyone anymore, apparently.
It simply had none of the cachet of Wednesday, hump day,
with that tummy tickling bottoming out, leading us all
into the best day of the workweek, Thursday he claimed,
when everyone worked harder to get the weekend started
ahead of time, before the calendar could notice.
People were always getting ready for Tomorrow.

One would think that a personal philosophy
shared by a grandfather to his granddaughter
over his very best specialty, a no-no breakfast 
of waffles and semi-softened vanilla ice cream, 
topped as well with the syrup of his homeland
would be as sweet as the meal, sappy even.
Instead, this four-year-old angel with the blondest halo
was darkly warned against every imaginable danger
as though simply by warning her he had saved her.
I never scared my kids straight. I didn’t believe in that.

But for the old man, wrapped tight in fear and mistrust
there was rarely enough of every Today for him
to adequately concern himself with everything
gone mad in the disintegrating light of Yesterday.
Much less time to stew and to hem and haw
over the promise of darkness to come Tomorrow.
It was as if Tomorrow was forever looming above
and ahead, an omen in and of itself like some vulture
circling the skies, measuring his and our future corpses.
Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them, nor for us.

Tomorrow wasn’t even aware of him, not at the moment,
because Tomorrow never looks back, neither to Today
nor to Yesterday, a fact that left the old man more upset,
flummoxed and flabbergasted, he would say,
that there was simply no measurable future in living
if the living was to be so fraught with every danger
that he could imagine, confirmed by the radiomen
whose messages were clearest when the skies were darkest.
Tomorrow wanted nothing to do with their messaging.
My daughter agreed. Tomorrow didn’t even know they were there.