Last Words

I too love my small life.

The miracle gets shoved into the oven,

comes out with its desire whitened.

A crack is not necessarily a fault

and when the fire lies down, it becomes

earth and earth has a dream: us

so you can’t be too careful. In fact,

you can’t be careful at all.

Too many facets.

The bus of everything

pulls into the depot of nothing.

Or is it the bus of nothing

pulling into the depot of everything?

In god’s image: acid-yellow slow sign.

In god’s image: muster of crows.

Times the symptoms are memory loss and falling.

Times the symptoms are memory loss and falling

and the sick friend walks across town and knocks

and the sad friend hangs a map of laughter

on his office wall and the crazy friend swears

everything will be all right.

Sure it will.

O horse, come nearer.

Maybe when you die.

‘Tis well, says George Washington,

dismissing the doctors trying to

blister and bleed him out of becoming

the dollar bill. I am slain, says Polonius,

act III, scene iv, the only instance

of his getting quickly to the point,

audience reaction calculated to the ounce

of fake blood. Too much: farce, too little:

quaint. Walt Whitman wrote that death

is far luckier than we supposed although

he may have considered addenda as he lay

turning into mush, not grass.

Your last words, I never want to hear them!

What if everyone’s combined into one big poem

and I’m stuck with a preposition? Oh well,

even prepositions have their place

like kudzu. We are human beings, not

texts. Not loudspeakers or layers of gas.

Not even jellyfish. Is tranquility

possible? I want dot dot dot gasp.

You must dot dot dot gurgle.

I used to move pretty fast.

Invisible, barefoot river.