Obituary Dreams
I want my obituary to lie
and say I built underground vineyards
for motherless drunks
and duplicitous widows.
A place to blow my nose,
a place to blow my mind.
But if my obituary is honest,
it would have to say
I bulldozed a museum
and built a mental home
beside a fetid swamp.
That there were wards full of skeptics
wearing crumpled tin hats
who fell silent before Buddha
without being born.
They sold Him dead pigeons,
and severed His ear.
He was never the same
so he invented the West.
I wish it could be said
I had dreams about gold
pumping through my veins,
and the air that I breathed
polished my eyes
into towers of glass
so I could see distant moons.
But the truth is
I shared my nightmares
with my frail wife—
visions of P45s
and hysterical dogs
mauling our cat.
My wife passed away
beneath a layer of fog,
simply stunned by the shock.
Please say when I die
that I seduced the world
with an open mouth kiss.
Say I was good—
a man who read books,
all the way to the end,
and a lover
of milkshakes
that whitened my teeth.
Say I was a man,
with transparent flaws
and a face for TV—
clean shaven and blushed.
But none of that is real,
the truth is far stranger.
I ate lightbulbs with bread,
and spat out the crust.
My motto was cruel—
let there be life!
and then stamp it to death.
Above all, know this:
I just wanted to walk
with a fashionable limp,
and after I’m gone
just let the ink flow,
wherever it may.
The King
I want to sing
with a leather-clad Elvis
and taste his guitar.
I need to feel the gloom
of his blue suede shoes,
then swipe back his hair
with a samurai sword.
I’m sorry he’s dead,
we could have been friends—
flossed the meat from our teeth
and tumbled down hills.
We’d babble in tongues,
then pray through our tears.
What would he think
of a disco in flames?
What would he think
of cosmic debris?
Let me draw a graph
on his family saloon
And then pummel his gut.
The great man passed away
a long time ago,
but I still want to drown
his overgrown hands,
and then mock his beatific name,
as he lures the tides
with a deluge of jazz.