Poem Because There Was Something Approximating Life Before You First Said My Name

That “something” felt like getting wasted
on mango-melon margaritas while attending
a sham-schmancy reception

as the plus-one to a member of the wedding
party following Atlantic City-nuptials
and waking hungover and horny

in a fenced field full of donkeys
in New Mexico. Old Mexico sounds like
a kind of phantom nostalgia
I feel about some dead bards

and some bards dead to me.
I’m dead to plenty of other people,
but they’re lifetimes away at this point.

At this point in a poem, poets normally
hope to rearrange normalcy, so
this piece’s new title is
“Verse Since You’re My Afterlife of Choice,”

and ends up telling it on the mountain
you’re better (if only you were near me!) than
spellcheck, soap, sunshine, and being saved

from the aggravation of rush hour,
all combined into some sort of
amalgam altogether astounding.

The Next Lives Supplicating to Mortals

Well, friends, it’s official:
Death is scared of us.
Death is an unlicensed
notary republic. Death
is oceanfront property

in Kansas. Take a vacation
in your brain: remember
the good old days when
praying meant making
out with Heaven, clumsy

as horny teens. We’re that
feeling minus fears over
what you might do wrong,
what your first affection’s
object might do too right.

Everybody still embodied,
please release worries: you
may hate it, but you will
dwell forever in Wichita, or
in one Other, or in Another.

Now That’s Entertainment

I’m flying the redeye from the Hollywood Burbank
Airport to Buffalo, America’s chronic case of IBS,
to make it to the wake I’m aiming to get laid after,
and after a transfer in Vegas, the in-flight flicks to pick
from include: Cast Away, Final Destination, United 93.
Passengers around me consume the National Inquirer,
digital solitaire, the book Anatomy and Embalming,
and streamed replays of the Trojan Ecstasy Condom
Bowl or some other sport-ball event we’ve sunk to.
I close my eyes. I’m too distracted—by the bored,
horrified babies who are right to be wailing and by
everyone’s distractions—to be distracted by my own
diversions. Turbulence wobbles the wings. I need to
relearn how to live forever, but I can’t find myself
in a peaceful place to do so, let alone enough time.