Morbid Thoughts On a Sunny Morning

Friends are falling. Hips and knees are letting us down…literally. Hearing is diminished. Sight blurred. Hair thinning. Memory fuzzy. We’re losing height.  It’s as if we are being written out of our own script. In fact maybe this is a re-run and I’m already a goner. I’d hate to think I died and it slipped my mind. Could it be that I fell on my face into a key lime pie or a vat of chocolate malt crunch ice cream and am too busy enjoying my demise to notice? I must check Google to see if I exist.

There was a time I was happy to die for my country but I got over that in a New York minute. I knew early on I was not made of such stern stuff. Throwing myself on a hand grenade to save the flag is not my idea of how to spend an afternoon.  If I were Galileo I probably would have renounced all my scientific sacrilege rather than endure another session on the stretching rack or whatever monstrous papal technology of persuasion was in use in the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Immortality is a comforting thought but it doesn’t do much good for the corporeal body of the late-lamented one. This morning I put on a CD of Glenn Miller’s biggest hits. His music brought that familiar sound back into the room but as far as I know he is still dead. On the other hand it can’t hurt to be a household word like Mozart, Einstein or even a Caesar salad or a Hoover vacuum. I wonder how it feels posthumously to have a medical condition carry your name into posterity.  I’d rather be remembered as a Heimlich maneuver than a bout of Hodgkins. Imagine having a suffix after your name like Whitmanesque or Shakespearean.  Another way to be immortalized closer to home is to have your name under lamination on the menu of a local deli such as: A Billy Crystal………turkey pastrami, brisket, and Russian dressing. We once knew a poet who was also a waiter at Izzy’s Deli. Perhaps his best-known published work was a Jerry Katz sandwich. I’ll have to settle for the Norman Invasion.

Then there is love. Love between Peggy and me to cite one such. I submit this to the sum of all other great loves. No, strike that. Each love speaks its own language fluent to nobody else. What if love both charges the air and gentles it? Love opens the fist, to the soft skin of the palm. It causes a drone to go astray from the wedding party with one bad guy among dozens and allows the suicide bomber to inhale a more rarefied air, causing him to unstrap his arsenal. Death is no match for love.

It's a nice thought, anyway, and it can't hurt.

What I really want to say is, Fuck You, Death. Just get out of my head and away from my door. I know you're that man going around taking names. I plan on not being home when you knock and I hope all my family and friends don’t answer either.

About twenty years ago a poet friend, Bob Flanagan, wrote a book called, It’s Fun to Be Dead…. as if he had a sneak preview. He died of cystic fibrosis shortly after. If anybody could report back to us it was Bob. Absent of any opposing view I’ll go along with him but not just now or in the near future.