Begrudging The Dead

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I go through your stories, the poems
about your daughter,
the noir entries that played off of
the wasted miles we knew
when we played
together in a band,
and it can’t be true, that you’re dead at a too-young 47.
I wrote you an email when I saw
the notice, thinking, hoping
that it was a prank
or a decoy maneuver done
in desperation to keep your
little girl at your side,
away from the mother
you no longer trusted,
the young female
who danced in a Tijuana club
for lucre before heading to some
small room upstairs
with the moment’s guest.
You never answered, and
now,
I know you’re really gone.
The autopsy report’s cold
epitaph: Hypertensive and Atherosclerotic
Cardiovascular disease; plaque building
up inside your worried heart as you
carted your two-year-old from station
to station, seeking
some clean solace from the blackened pits
of Zona Norte.
I have no one to talk to about you,
no friends in common close by;
I want to tell a girl you
used to know,
but I’m afraid
of what she’d say, turning it
into a diatribe
that would end up being
about her–this is
how bad it’s become:
there’s no one left to share
grief with, for fear
these hollow names will hiss and recede,
begrudging even the dead.

Half-Past Penance

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So here he was, a middle-aged man staring at the inane brightness of the screen before him.
The online job application read, in part:
“Describe, in your own words, why you are
ideally suited for this position.”

What could he say?  He wasn’t ideally suited for this position.
Did he even know what the ideal job for him would be?
The gently buffered term “career change” kept haunting him,
with its connotations of obsolescence and dispensable skills.
He remembered signing a drawing he had done an eternity ago,
of a warrior in his chariot, and dating it: October,1977.

He started to fill in the required field, another awkward exercise in pragmatic reinvention, filing down the edges of the round hole
so the square peg might pass inspection, undetected.
He stopped, X’d out the browser, and picked up his drawing marker.

1977.

He put down the marker and watched it roll slowly across the desk. He clicked on the browser icon, hoping the cookies had saved the information he had input on the last page.
He didn’t have the words to condense his life
all over again.