poem

 The Story of Us

Everyone has their own idea

On the best way to die.

Not too young or old

Not too demented.

Preferably not alone. 

There is a certain segment of the male cohort

Who envision a late in life myocardial infarction

Halfway through the conjugal act with a much younger consort.

The sentimentalists prefer a soft bed

Numbed to the bone with morphine while 

Gazing into the eyes of everyone they love.

Then there are the hot air balloon enthusiasts 

Who prefer to drift out over the continental shelf 

And watch the stars as the flame slowly dims out.

Romantic novelists pine for something that ends

With two broken hearts— the one who dies

And the one condemned to live. 

For me, I just want to be reading

When the final moment comes

Crashing down, hopefully mid-

Sentence in a banger of a passage

From Molly Bloom or David Foster Wallace,

Or while I’m staring off in reverie,

As I often do, when a certain line

In a banger of a poem really hits.

Death, I’m sure, would have some fun with it—

Wait until I was thoroughly engrossed and then 

Dim the shades just before the killer

Was revealed at the end of the Victorian mystery.

Or whisk me off to Valhalla right before love

Was finally requited in a dogeared Swedish romance.

Or worse, drop the hammer halfway through some

Post-modernist dreck just as the protagonist—

Billy Pumpkin or Rendezvous Jack, probably—

Was intoning the last rites over a minor character, 

Soon to be corpse, named jeffrey parks in yet

Another self-referential run-on sentence monologue

Sorely lacking in guidepost punctuation.

But if I was reading from the Story of Us

I’d like to think Death would exercise

A little patience…. even kindness.

He’d let me finish.

And when I got to the end 

Of everything I’d written 

He’d lean in close and quietly

Ask if I’d like to write one last line.

I’d think for a moment, finding the words,

And then when I reached for the pen

The ornery son of a gun would grin 

And darkness would swiftly descend.

12/8/24