Afterlife
In the years before we died, we puttered
inside our houses while motorcycles
and leaf blowers roared and groaned in savage
rage and pain outside, and if our old black
Bakelite telephones, squatting silent
amidst motley clutter like abstract statues
of outsized toads, should ever jangle
as of old, startling dust motes into dance
in stale air, it would be only robot voices
calling to beg or scare us into giving up
our secret numbers. Land lines, our tablet-
thumbing grandchildren sneered, sounding
like land mines to worn-out ears. Ever more
we missed long-dead dear ones, and as we drift-
dozed in our recliner rockers we dreamt
of ecstatic embraces in paradise
and hanging out forever in infinite bliss
with those who’d always laughed at our jokes
and listened to our old stories, no matter
how often we told them. So imagine
our disappointment when the warmest friends
of our salad days greeted us with polite,
unsurprised indifference and turned back
to talk with their netherworld new friends
without bothering to introduce us.
If we stepped outside the crimson domes
to escape the almost unbearable heat
of the bonfires that sparkled across black
infinity, our sole eternal scenery,
cold immediately seemed to seize us.
Strange, because we had no bodies anymore,
or personalities, for that matter.
Nonetheless, this had to be the nicest place
since we’d always been the nicest people,
and everyone took turns either complaining
or saying, “It is what it is,” with a curt shrug.
Nevertheless, we’d arrived trailing thoughts
like clouds of exhaust smoke, and these grew
to become a single yearning that looked ever-
forward to a rewarding afterdeath.
inside our houses while motorcycles
and leaf blowers roared and groaned in savage
rage and pain outside, and if our old black
Bakelite telephones, squatting silent
amidst motley clutter like abstract statues
of outsized toads, should ever jangle
as of old, startling dust motes into dance
in stale air, it would be only robot voices
calling to beg or scare us into giving up
our secret numbers. Land lines, our tablet-
thumbing grandchildren sneered, sounding
like land mines to worn-out ears. Ever more
we missed long-dead dear ones, and as we drift-
dozed in our recliner rockers we dreamt
of ecstatic embraces in paradise
and hanging out forever in infinite bliss
with those who’d always laughed at our jokes
and listened to our old stories, no matter
how often we told them. So imagine
our disappointment when the warmest friends
of our salad days greeted us with polite,
unsurprised indifference and turned back
to talk with their netherworld new friends
without bothering to introduce us.
If we stepped outside the crimson domes
to escape the almost unbearable heat
of the bonfires that sparkled across black
infinity, our sole eternal scenery,
cold immediately seemed to seize us.
Strange, because we had no bodies anymore,
or personalities, for that matter.
Nonetheless, this had to be the nicest place
since we’d always been the nicest people,
and everyone took turns either complaining
or saying, “It is what it is,” with a curt shrug.
Nevertheless, we’d arrived trailing thoughts
like clouds of exhaust smoke, and these grew
to become a single yearning that looked ever-
forward to a rewarding afterdeath.
