Elegy On Toy Piano

Last Words

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 86 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. 87 ...