I love every square inch the monuments aren’t.
I walk over them, same the as-of-yet unmarked
days on the calendar that will remind us to pour
one out and think of our sweet dead friend.
His guffaw a black carrot of denial
burned in the toasters of our memory.
It’s a question I keep asking:
If the passenger pigeons covered the sun
for three days in a row as they flocked over
why not now a long death-shadow like hot taffy?
Drunk up in a single gulp of eyesight
and crushed on the floors of time: love,
a telepathy I’ve been tuned to.
Now a stupid Star Wars thing I’m asking:
How can Alec Guinness look in the middle distance
and say as if millions of voices cried out in terror
and were suddenly silenced while I must sit
in this old soup of the I bet often cheery dead
not tasting one of their bad or good attitudes?
Don’t laugh at my ignorance! Once I was
a great bullfighter. My prize was strips of flank
steak I took home from my spectatored murder.
I kept what I killed in my bursting gut.