in a perfect state of health. Our best goodbye
comes sure of all we’ve got to lose. Next,
when I’m ever whom I ever was, I'll build
something out of stone. Alone. Feel the weight
of this life, witness a thing close to permanence—
clumsy and rude—as I am likely to ever come.
Having done all that, in some years time, I will
jet ski down the River Styx, the day I die, wave
and yell, “I’m here!” over the sound of blasted
water, happy enough, having left an odd stack
of rocks. You see, my history is rearranging air.
Turn feral ideas into runway models, put truth
where people stare. Only to learn readers pray
for death. Yes! Step One to get reborn! As what?
Nothing that takes guts. Years. Or action, even.
As if life is merely waking more than once. Owed
a way to brave for simply having eyes, perhaps,
or made bold by all they learned in high school,
as if required reading homework left them divine.
Maybe I participated. Perhaps that was my life.
Bringing new air to the motionless, enchanting
them to believe they're on a runaway train
from Frankfurt to Berlin, or record-breaking
quarter-mile sprint, a hunt through forest dense
with ill whisperings and a taloned, fingery moss.
Every line I create might end in a righteous sort
of jail time for people with barely faith enough
to pull the tab of a beer can or aim the remote.
And so, this renewed acquaintance with death,
who has remained my spectacular old friend,
as if we once rode three-speeds down a dry
Santiago Creek bed, dared each other to enter
the hobo’s lean-to, while he wandered around
our neighborhoods offering to sharpen knives.
Night, and only the necromancer believes
dawn is anything else but choice. Want. Ah,
this lust in the black arts for a lurid totality,
a world woven in joint quilt, or shared much
as a hologram, how we download the real
in sleep and it beams somehow before us,
withhold now my reflection from mirrors.
People describe my features. It isn’t me.
And maybe I have but one thing to say,
a poem written in the ink of all my days,
unlike the journalist who types a period
after river otters will go extinct if
nothing is done, lights a cigarette,
and cracks wise on the mayor’s wife.
That’s it? That’s how we are? Picnickers
by the Johnstown flood? “Look, there goes
the Williams house! There’s the church!”
Yet, a poem exists as opposed to a gun.
That’s what I’m saying. Plus, I love
the way Mr. Death never quits. Reader,
you’re safe. Take the pill. Get surgery.
Rest. You’re the one who’ll never die.
I’m laughing. I feel sheepish. Alright,
I’ll take the chance of a poem, versus
granite, stupid to the end, wrong
until the Glen Canyon dam’s gone again.
While the TV shouts out floor numbers
in a skyscraper mortared by agreement,
I demand elevators loosed among the clouds,
my own death as relentless role model.
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