Adventures in Still Living Still

You extend the opportunity
You have to live these days
As quietly as possible,
Accepting the challenge of being
Even quieter than you’ve ever been.

It’s a privilege you’ve gotten,
And you get that it’s a privilege
To be an old person, unmoneyed,
And hosting robustly advanced cancer
In a ship of brittle bones,
So long as you can be quiet and go on,
Mostly without much discomfort,
Mostly independently alone.

This is not sarcastic. This is not a joke.
This will not last, this tranquil passage.
Treat it like it is your home.
You had nothing on your schedule
Yesterday or the day before,
Nothing tomorrow for today.
For this little while, you’re drifting,
Watching. You don’t even have to row
Within this trough between the waves,
A trough that’s shallow, glossy smooth,
With low, green walls and light like glaze.

It’s your adventure, recently, to wait.
Your ship’s your quiet, windowed room.

The Symphony of Existence Whispers Secrets

Serendipity’s mellifluous resilience,
Answers AI, 5-4-3, commanded to pick

Three words. What a twee little twit this machine is.
Pick three short words. Joy hope love. Now you know it’s rigged.

Pick three words at random from the dictionary.
Admonish. Fluctuate. Inevitable. Ha.

Random my iron-red ass. Pick three concrete words.
Chair tree car. Now pick three words that aren’t so boring.

Luminescent saffron zephyr. Plus the smug note
Here are three more interesting words. You don’t say.

Now compose a poem using each of the fifteen
Of those words once. (That was a trick question. Scroll up.)

With Flies, It’s the Wings That Lie

As the dreamer in the corner
Of your window, you realize

You are, like that novelist wrote,
One among the many dead flies.

Good for you. It’s been a short life
Of long hours. So long as there’s time,

There’s so much more among small change
Rotating in and out of doors.

Don’t twitch your leg. Don’t try trembling,
Fly, you’re dead. Don’t you remember?

No, you don’t. It’s okay, wriggle.
You’ve always been as good as dead,

Which is, in turn, the opposite
Of having died. Your wings lie wide.

Landfill Planet

It’s fine, the clouds that establish the sky.
Observing this recent situation,

Recall a school day that was, what, fifty,
Maybe fifty-five years ago, the lot

Where, it being recess, most of the class
Had been organized for a kickball game,

The boy who couldn’t run or kick left out
Of necessity, thanks to frailty.

It was early spring, forsythia time,
But the day was unseasonably warm,

And the necessarily-excluded
Child was wildly exultant in the warmth.

He hobbled around the perimeter
Of the asphalt lot, hollering loudly

To all and no one in particular,
It’s eighty degrees out, take off your coats!

Surely, it wasn’t eighty degrees out,
And most of the children weren’t wearing coats.

Still, though his nickname that year was Retard,
No one shouted back at him to shut up,

And he was immensely pleased with himself.
He couldn’t stay on his feet for too long,

So he sat to rest on a concrete step
By a door with a black-and-yellow sign

He’d been told was for a fallout shelter,
Which clarified really nothing for him.

And that’s that. Exactly all the recall
Of that day’s then recent situation,

One invisible bubble of methane
Outgassing from somewhere inside a skull.

Huzzah for landfills. Hooray for them all,
Sediments gathering, leaking waste worlds.

Doom Jawing

It’s been a billion years now
You’ve been waiting for the end,
End of what, you couldn’t say.

Homo apocalyptus
Turned out to be durable
As quite a few predators,

Crocodilians, say, or gar,
Just hanging around, chomping
New lives as available,

Appearing proudly ancient
In manner of armature,
Sticking to old strategies.

The world will be ending soon—
Chomp!—for you, not for your teeth.