About the Dead: Poems

An Apology

[36] A n A P O L O G y Spiritual enlightenment is nothing more than a card trick called fifty-two-card-pick-up, and those dumptruck lights beaming down on you, that’s death, and in the afterlife you get a home movie about your life: the birth scene, the bicycle scene, the groping for the clasp of your first C-cup scene. you watch it the way an ascetic watches a leaf. There are no interruptions from global warming. no delivery guy knocks on the door asking you to please sign for your neighbor’s oxygen tanks. remember him? Wheezing down the driveway to the mailbox and back up in just under an hour; probably one of those poor suckers Monsanto tried to bury in asbestos—but wait a minute, this is your afterlife, the one you paid for, the one you sat on your hands your entire life for, ignoring every vengeful, lustful, and hateful impulse for. you know what, i hate people like you. Pretending to be so sanctimonious when clearly you’d like nothing more than to carpet-bomb the stinking lot of yahoos and redneck gurus and corporate litigates and buglers and wasters and speakeasy filchers and free market degenerates who gambled away your father’s retirement, yanking the ripcords on their golden parachutes. Maybe your time down here might’ve been better spent learning to fire an M-16 instead of patchworking daisies into your coffin lining. i apologize, that last one was out of line. ...