The Way Old People Think If They Could Talk

1)


Born pregnant, we all carry

the secret, slippery thing, held

in a balloon, stuffed somewhere

behnd the ribs, inside the stomach,

within the entrails, maybe travelling

around as we walk into the bar

to a new place as we stagger out.

Yet we know nothing of its birth,

shocked one day to ache of gone,

with no evidence in the world

the missing child was ever born,

had ever lived, had unfurled

in action and color in example

for this still world that still exists.




2)


Look, he never was

the man behind that name,

and now his keys to identity lie
splat flat on the breakfast bar,

exhausted landlord, hunched

over coffee, jail reluctant

to start another cage day.

That name was an address,

a building, its architecture past,

with tenants in the hundreds,

and management tired

of all the yelling, loud parties,

sad stories when the rent's due,

evictions, and those gone missing.

Once more, a knocking at the door,

and he mumbles loud as a troll

from beneath a wooden bridge

as schoolchildren dance on over,

"Ahhh, shurrruppp." Daydreams
in the colors of dried blood and smoke

of the moment he gives his keys up.




3)
People live with a spirit hat,

only once removed:
in line to heaven’s gate,
so the dead can discover
the single thing they collected
all their lives, every day, stuffed
into the cap, fedodra, beanie, beret,

or big and bouncy thing with wings and lace.
The dead are puzzled at what they'd done.
One person dofts a hatful of snowflakes.

Another a hatful of post-it notes.

Pocket knives, flower petals, rocks

shaped like hearts, tears of friends,

beer bottle caps, old pencils, good pens,

ATM receipts, funeral cards, shiny pennies....

Each night the angels talk as they unwind;

again one asks, “What was the point of that?”
The old people then just sit and talk about their kids.

“They suffer so from language,” angels all agree.




4)

And the next thing that happened

arrived in a slurry of raspberries
and gravel in the mouth of a salesman

type sitting next to me on a plane
bound for Orlando, my new hell,
a guy in a suit you buy 3 at a time,
drunk upon  boarding, ready to talk,
and I hate revelation. God shock:
"That song, Vous Deux Love, I

sang it, I wrote it, I designed it."

!One of my favorite songs of all time!

It was Mark LeFevre, of Bango!

I hated him for being old,

the puffy, sagging skin, and hair

hanging like dead ferns

off a grey, pink, yellow cliffside.

"It's more beautiful than me,

man, it still makes women fall;
it still makes people wonder about

whatever they can't figure out, man."

And I wished he'd shut up, a dead end

for sure, an old street out of my hometown
all barricaded up.
 Like it never was.
"That's just the way it is, man.

I shrivel, and will die one day, but

the song sails out forever, if

it's done right, 
to unknowable code.
We die. The nothingness of song
lives, man. Everything is about
the nothing, the nothing beyond us,
the nothing that lives forever

until God is finally born, man."
When he said we're all bags
of swamp water, I ordered drinks
so he'd fall asleep and I could finish
my PowerPoint presentation.

"...we create the afterlife..."