I know it’s unseemly
to keep on grieving, go on
sorrowing this way.
It’s a presumption, some might say
(since everybody loses someone,
why should anybody claim
to bear them all, all
over, all at once,
each day?).
Unseemly to obsess
on suffering, in such
milieus, the top five
tourist destinations full
of dogs in hot cars, birds abandoned,
toddlers come to understand they can’t
be coddled from now on, and grown men,
lovelorn, throwing up in bushes near the dance...
(Even the King is lonely: the Enquirer’s lucre
has seduced the page. Alas, he loved
that bobbed, that bobbing
head.) And in the under-
funded hospice, there’s an only
irritable night-nurse. In a home with a
capital H, in daily and unfettered joys
an idiot appears advanced. We wish
we could, ourselves, slow down. Instead
we get on with the show. Rehearse
means Quick now, bring those big
black limos back around.