life, death & the in-betweens

honesty shot through the prism

of a rapier wit,

poetry from laughter and life.

--

life is on the edges,

still we too often cling to the cushioned walls

afraid of death omniscient beyond

while killing ourselves so subtly within.

why does it take the loss

of a loved one to give us pause

in this slow-motion dance of subliminal waste?

--

that fairness not be fair weathered

or kindness out of vogue,

that searching wanderlust go walking with a quiet resolve.

--

that simply to be and be hilarious

might just be the most important,

the most caring,

most healing thing of all.

for Larry, RIP.

Gone Daddy Gone

A Coca Cola Coffin.

A Marblesque Bobble-headstone.

A Plexiglass Lava Lamp Urn

with Racing Stripes.

Some kind words,

or at least some kind of words.

Appeasement and appeals

to the gods and angels

that they welcome our loved one "home."

The rituals of a species

still early in their evolution.

We bury, we burn, we stuff.

We entomb and mummify

and jettison to the sea.

We conjure up fantastic scenarios

of reunited ghostly bliss

to quell that most primal of fears:

the absence of consciousness,

the disappearance of self.



What a horrific thought,

that something

- everything -

can in a quiet instant

become the void.

We think of that place

as a bottomless solitude,

ascribe emotions

to what is by definition their absence.

This is perhaps to me

the most merciful thing of all:

you're never around

anymore to deal

with what has happened to you.


You are gone, daddy.

Gone.

33 revolutions ('round a middle aged son)

The night stands before me, sick.

Dawn has seemed absent for eons in this moment;

forgotten, abandoned, broken.

The day lies behind me, blessed.

An abscess to its optimism, the dusk drains me off along with the light;

put down, thrown up, sticky.

My dad reached bottom thirty-three years ago this week,

touching down into the morgue in the basement at Everett General.

Gastly, ghostly, jaundiced.

Everett General, the hospital of my birth, a stone's throw from our home.

His bottle from that point forever empty (just one more for the road, formaldehyde straight up).

Rotting, rigor, relief.

The worst hangover is, in the end, no hangover at all (in fact, is nothing whatsoever).

Not when you're staring up fish-eyed from a gurney at a "standard 'Y' incision"

slicing down to your belly revealing booze as your religion.

(the M.E. crosses herself: "we have a high priest among us today, my young interns.")

Not when you're cooking into ashes in the crematorium oven.

Not when your memories serve to brutalize the psyche of your children.

No. Soup. For. You. The bar is closed.