Forward planning usually means pensions, insurance and tidy spreadsheets, so the title of Dave Bonta's poem sets up a dry, almost bureaucratic joke. The deadline it has in mind is the biggest one there is. The speaker sits down to take stock before death, and the surprise is how little he finds and how calmly he reports it. The central idea is that a life can be added up in a handful of modest things, and that the total need not be a loss. The poem ends on possibility instead.
The first couplet carries a double meaning. "For death I am making / up my accounts" reads at first as a plain act of bookkeeping, but the line break splits the phrasal verb. "Making" hangs alone for a moment before "up" arrives, and "making up" can mean inventing as well as tallying. "Accounts" can be financial ledgers or stories told. The speaker may be settling his books, or he may be composing a version of his life, and the poem never says which. Even "for death" is open. It could mean in preparation for it, or on behalf of it, as if death were a creditor waiting to be shown the figures.
What follows is the inventory, and its key word is "little", which appears four times: "my little tongue", "a little talk", "a little house", "a little moon". The repetition shrinks everything to nursery-rhyme scale. The tone is affectionate rather than self-pitying, close to the way a child lists treasures. Even the one different adjective, "very pretty", sounds artless and pleased. The items themselves are telling. The tongue is a body part and also the instrument of language, so the speaker's main possession is his voice, and "talk" suggests ordinary conversation, perhaps small talk, rather than grand speeches. A house is a conventional asset, but a moon cannot be owned by anyone. By entering it in the books as casually as the house, the speaker quietly redefines wealth. Beauty and daily speech count as much as property.
The form matches this modesty. There is no punctuation, no rhyme, and no capital letters except the pronoun "I", so the poem reads like thought moving at the speed of speech. The sound is soft and close-mouthed, with the repeated l's of "little" and the t's of "tongue", "talk" and "pretty" giving it a gentle, almost lisping music. The couplets also have a pattern. In the first three, a longer first line is followed by a shorter one, so each stanza settles downward like a figure being entered and totted up. The last couplet reverses this. "And in the cards" is brief, and "an opportunity to be" stretches out after it. The poem's shape opens just as its meaning does.
That final couplet changes the register. "In the cards" brings in fortune-telling and games of chance, as though the ledger were suddenly a hand dealt by fate. "Opportunity" is a salesman's or a business plan's word, which recalls the commercial language of "accounts" and the title. But the sentence ends on "to be", and the infinitive has no object. It echoes Hamlet's famous phrase, though the poem seems to take only its first half, with no "or not". The missing full stop leaves the line suspended. Judging by the wording, the speaker's balance is not a deficit. After the accounting, what remains is simply the chance of existing, and the reader is left to decide whether that means living more fully now or being in some way beyond death.
The poem is significant because it takes a subject that tends to produce solemnity and handles it with lightness and precision. In eight short lines it shows that "forward planning" for death turns into a way of looking back with gratitude at a tongue, some talk, a pretty house and a moon. Its humble vocabulary makes the ending land with more force. By the time "to be" arrives, the reader has been taught to value small things, and the smallest word turns out to be the largest.