The title makes the joke before the poem has said anything: the speaker is an "Ancient Relic", something dug up, dusted off and labelled. The opening lines build on that idea. "Earthen ware jars", "the tide and the dust storm" suggest an object buried, scattered and washed up again. The line "Forever I rearranged myself" can be read as a pot being pieced back together from shards, and then the speaker simply sets off "across town". The poem moves from an archaeological image of a self in fragments to an ordinary person on an ordinary street.
The street is empty, and the speaker's expectations are odd. He hopes to see "the shroud in all its splendour", a burial cloth treated as a spectacle, and in the next breath hopes for "the new dawn and the brilliant primroses". Death and spring sit side by side, and the speaker seems unsure which one to watch for. The line between them, "Too much as I rambled on at length", is half a sentence, so it rambles as it describes rambling.
The third stanza is the poem's centre and its longest stretch. "Aghast!" is the only moment of real alarm, as the speaker's "head and heart had swollen to immense proportions". What follows is a rush of images at different scales. Life is a "sea of cacophonous swirling and abstractions". The earth is an "orbiting slab of debris". The crowd is a "twisted populace". Then the camera zooms into the body, to blood pounding in the head and "the animalistic mechanism of the heart pumping its oil around this aging body". That phrase is the most striking in the poem because it mixes animal and machine, so the heart is both a creature and an engine that needs lubricating. The vocabulary is scornful, with debris, twisted and cacophonous, yet the verbs are tender. He "hoped to stay and linger forever" and wants "to watch awhile longer". He may despise the spectacle, but he does not want to leave it. The repeated "To watch… To feel…" builds the stanza into a wish list.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre here. The poem is free verse in which most lines are end-stopped, so each one lands as a separate statement. That gives the poem something of the feel of a list or a ledger, which prepares for the ending. Line length does a lot of the work. The third stanza sprawls, as though the speaker's swollen head had stretched the lines, and the final stanza shrinks to short, flat sentences: "The past is my record."
That last stanza changes the tone. "Oh joy!" could be sincere or sour, and the poem doesn't say which. Then comes the central metaphor, "Tomorrow is a bank account of my life". The future becomes savings, something to check and hope is full. The syntax starts to slip. "Expecting to what tomorrow will bring" has a word missing, and "foreword" appears where "forward" is meant. Whether or not that was deliberate, "foreword" is a pleasing accident, since a foreword is the opening of a book, and the line then hints at a life still being introduced. Judging by the wording, though, the slips may simply be careless, and a reader should be cautious about treating them as design.
The closing lines are the neatest. "Record" means a file of past deeds, but with "No longer in the top fifty" it also means a chart position, like a pop single sliding down the rankings. After the shroud, the primroses and the orbiting debris, the poem ends on a small, comic, very human anxiety about status. It is a deflating drop, and it is probably the point. The speaker's cosmic reflections end up as a worry about not being as important as he once was.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses both easy options for writing about age. It neither offers calm wisdom nor wallows in lament. Instead it lets grandeur and pettiness share the same breath, with mythic jars next to bank accounts and a heart that is both animal and machine. The speaker is a relic, but one still taking notes, still wanting to "watch awhile longer" and, however awkwardly, still looking forward.