Barbara

Death sits in the corner, picking his nails,
pretending to ignore me.
The guy recently took a friend of mine from work,
a psychologist, a beautiful woman, a good mother.
This angers me but there’s nothing I can say
that will penetrate Death’s skin.
He won’t bring Barbara back no matter how much
I beg or plead.

One of the last times I saw her I gave her
a get well card with Tootsie Rolls taped inside.
Her cancer had resurfaced and Tootsie Rolls
were the only thing I knew to say.
But now Tootsie Rolls can’t reach her.
Neither can her family’s love.
Neither can I.

Death sits in the corner whistling a tune.
Barbara is in that song, I know it,
but I’m still mad at the guy.
I still want him to go away.

E pluribus unum

Now he is a bald head
on a commemorative coin,
but once
young French beauties
shined that head with their
soft hands.
He was such a cutey,
they thought,
such a funny,
sly old fox.

Benjamin Franklin in Paris,
seducing the crowds
with his coonskin hat
and his ideas of freedom
that were like some
trumpet blast
out of mythic Greece.

And before that, before
1776
with its guns and fifes,
there was still the
man of ideas.

The man of business,
squeezing cash out of
every tool he handled,
encouraging frugality
in his little almanac.

And the man of science,
poking God’s blue skin
with his high kite,
encouraging divine sparks.

But that man,
that very real flesh
is long gone,
dead dead dead,
like all of us eventually.

His ghost sits on a coin
with a strange look
on his face,
like he can’t quite figure out
how he got there.

Dreams of the undead

The blond with the beautiful thighs
lay naked in my bed. A dream,
of course,
for the woman ignores me at the gym.
All of our man eyes burn holes in her flesh
and you don’t fan the flames
by batting your baby blues back.
You walk around us like a zombie.
And we stagger after her,
zombies ourselves,
desiring everything but her brains.
I try not to overdo it;
I am on the cusp of dirty old manhood
and should not stare at younger women overlong.
So it was strange to find her thighs
under my dream sheets.
We were two kids
playing at the edges of love.
Then a zombie groaned in the night
and I woke up alone.