Finishing this Cortado

On a wet morning in October,

I wonder how much coffee

I've drunk in my life.

 

I do a quick calculation

based upon twenty years of coffee drinking

where, roughly, three cups a day,

if a typical cup 

is two hundred and twenty five millimetres of liquid,

comes to four million nine hundred 

and twenty seven thousand 

and five hundred millilitres of coffee

or 

one thousand and eighty three point 

three imperial gallons, 

 

which is enough to fill forty bathtubs 

or an eight foot by six foot plunge pool

(according to poolandspa.com) 

but which still does not seem

as much coffee as I imagined,

picturing instead at least an average size

swimming pool, 

or even a good way onto

an Olympic size pool,

which I've been slowly topping up

through the course of my life.

 

An Olympian task I will complete

with a last espresso drunk on my deathbed,

where upon I will close my eyes

to envision this deep reservoir,

vast as an ocean and stretching

in all directions,

 

the distant shore of my past

behind me,

and the vast darkness

of the unknown ahead,

infinite and black,

tempered only by a dash of milk.