My dad at the end
down to ice water and pain
Last breath and his stretched skin over skull,
Looking like a turkey’s throat--
Cut through
No Thanks
---giving
The undertakers come,
the younger looking like a freshman on a date
Refuse collectors
Lift /it/—a skin bag of bones,
like a decrepit wrinkled carpet
Onto their white winding sheet,
Roll /it/ up like a fabric cigar and place /it/ on a gurney--
“Rolled away...
all the burials, rolled...”
They wheel the thing outside
barely missing a left
edge of his big screen TV
My dad/obsessively/watched like a Fox;
So mundane,
Death...
No burning light,
“no raging against the dying”...
Dad’s last act
--breathing with a tube and drinking;
Not quite, when I arrived
only 7 minutes before the Taker
And joined my mom and sister at his contraption bed,
I told Dad my last joke,
the 4 of /us all together/ he on hold/
My dad felt my hand--
Then not.
“That’s all folks.”
--
Deaf to Death
Am I still deaf to death
Even Dad’s demise?
Hard to ‘ear’ like him,
No mourn, only even
Less
because of all that immortal noise
The daily barrage of clamor
How can one imagine
Zero
0?
150,000 /zeros/ every day/sunset
around the global 0
spinning
in
the spaced black darkness;
We all await that last straw
Poked into eternity,
Like through a screen door in a tornado’d torrential storm;
Another human’s missing,
Only hole in water
after a finger’s withdrawn.
Billions in the past, no more, one less
Dusted to stars,
scattered to the cosmic wind,
No more,
Not even less;
Not even
Not.
-- To Dad.
Miss you.
Dan
