The Biscuit Joint: Poems

To Everyone Who Has Died Since I Was Born

43 TO EVERYONE WHO HAS DIED SINCE I WAS BORN There are so many of you! Thanks for coming by. No telling what the neighbors will say, not to mention the people in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi whose front yards you’ve also filled. Or the people in the whole world, really. How many of you are there? After all, you started dying when I started breathing, one by one in your beds and then more quickly in wars as well as mass famines, deliberate and otherwise. Speaking of which, Hitler and Stalin died, too, though I don’t exactly see them walking around among you and shaking hands! Why not, though? What are you going to do, kill them again? Anyway, how many—wait, I can look it up in another window, where I see the best estimate is four billion, which sounds a little too good to be true, just as they say that Mount Everest is exactly twenty-three thousand feet high whereas it’s reported as twenty-three thousand and two in the reference books so the real height won’t sound like a guess. When Walt Whitman was between thirty-one and thirty-three, as he says in “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” a desire that had been flitting through his life, or hovering on the flanks, had steadily advanced to the front and finally dominated everything, and this was his wish to express in poetic form his own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic personality while also tallying— and this is the money part—“the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days” and to “exploit that personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive 44 sense than any hitherto poem or book.” Emphasis mine! Anyway, Whitman did it, and I’m trying, with help from so many others: Dante, for example, and Shakespeare. John Donne, of course. Emily Dickinson. Anyway, I owe you people! I started having my fun about the time yours ended. Not that it’s all been draft beer and hot fudge sundaes: I’ve worked hard, though most of you wouldn’t call what I do work. And I’ve written some halfway decent poems, though none like the ones by my masters, and here I have to say that the great majority of you are lucky you missed out on the internet with its postings of whatever anybody feels like saying and, worse, what anybody else feels like saying back, which, in my case, would mean jackasses who haven’t done a damned thing with their lives crawling all over me for comparing myself, which I’m so not doing, to those whom Keats called “the mighty dead.” And though poetry doesn’t mean anything to most of you, a lot of you are in those poems I wrote earlier, and you’re all in this one. Come on in, Grandma! You can sit next to Federico García Lorca. ...