How can this life be gone
So rich so variable
So full of incident
Madly overflowing with superfluous detail

People can accommodate themselves
I’ve seen it
My father so pleased that I’d arrived
He’d been in pain
But morphine made it stop somewhat
He’d begged for morphine
Who’d been blown up in World War II
And I knew that he knew
Bravest of men
Otherwise he would have never suffered such indignity
As to beg

So many memories
And yet when I survey them
So many traumas
So many disappointments
I’ve done some begging in my time
Who am not brave
But then my death isn’t imminent
No more than usual anyway
Maybe I’ll feel differently
As I feel the time draw near

But you can go at any time
Can’t you
And then
Just nothing

Sorry about the lack of images
This just isn’t a visual experience
This isn’t entertainment
Sorry about the lack of rhetorical flair
Other poets speak more artfully than I
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff
Something of significance to leave behind
Where I can’t find it

That unthinkable nothingness
That repulsive absence
To be aware now of being unaware
Unaware unbeing
The icy hand’s encroachment
That’s nothing to

Don’t be nostalgic for the individual
Already so dividual
When we say we go
We mean we go somewhere
Not gone therefore
Not departed
No mere relocation
Not forgotten
Just nothing

The rest of the world will still exist
As it has existed before
Worlds end and other worlds begin
Other worlds

Death is death
Go to hell St. Paul

It doesn’t give permission
This mortality
To treat yourself badly or anybody else
Some people say they have it figured out
I doubt that they do
But it doesn’t give you license to punish

On the contrary
It enjoins the opposite
You must be kind

Again I see myself
On the old boat
Or is it a bus
Laden with the naked
The bewildered
Just as we were when we lived
The ones who forgot how
The ones who die as drooling children
No arrival no destination no eventful journey
Always only the setting out