What Have You Not Done Now?

And then, every day or few days,
Every few weeks at the outside,
There’s the hard thing you have to do,
Much as you don’t want to do it,

And usually it’s a small thing
Where once you start it, you finish
And can feel good about yourself
For a little while afterward,

Whoever you are, dictator,
Revolutionary, no one
Of any particular note,
Ordinary and complicit.

Other times, it’s a huge, hard task
Lingering on the horizon
And can’t be finished at a go,
Or will change everything once done,

So that you live in dread of it,
And sometimes you fail to do it,
And that, too, changes everything,
The hard thing that you never did.