Death on the Installment Plan
“I have learned that Jesus loves me
because the TV tells me so.”
Daniel Jones,
“After forty-six days on the Psycho Ward”
The script he was a character in
had him tricked out like some
vagabond mountebank without
a license to sell, all his wares lost
in the apocalyptic ruins of the place
he was stumbling out of like Steadman’s
Macbeth carrying a locked suitcase
full of heads leaking blood on a ruined,
rutted road, ace archer’s arrows instead
of a necktie, shafts bent where they
hit his chest, or like a refugee from
a burning wood, Bierce characters
from The Wilderness trying to escape
the conflagration and finding an original
Twilight Zone episode of the Holocaust,
a Dresden bombing like Slaughterhouse 5,
one that never made it from a cutting room
floor, a young Robert Redford as Death
with a medicine bag making house calls
in the tenements, ghettos of a vanishing
world, handing out vouchers for his
treatment, down payments for a layaway,
pay as you go installment plan.
The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse
The headline of The Weekly World
News
proclaimed: 4 Horsemen of the
Apocalypse
Photographed in Arizona just days
ago!
And all I could think of was: Where
else?
The badly out of focus picture of the
boys
accompanying the headline suggested
some
bad dudes, pissed off riders of the
purple
sage hell bent for a tour of duty
exacting
rage, retribution and
revenge.
At first, the picture suggested
nothing
more exciting than every other
fraternity
party I had attended, in another
life
as a college student, but looking
closer,
the one riding with the mace held
high
over his plumed head reminded me of
body
language peculiar to a certain kind
of
Neanderthal who majored in weight
lifting
at the local university. In fact, the whole
crew could have been the front line
of any
college football team and hadn't I
just
waited on them, collectively and
alone?
Wasn't I rude, as well, recently, even?
And wasn't it here, with the lights
low,
the clock with its frozen hands
stalled between
early morning hours, that I had
raised my voice
to ask for last call, and these same
men
had emerged from the shadows, the
names
of the living and the dead escaping
from
their lips?
The Dead Man Walks His Dog
He should look older
but he doesn't,
he's been dead too long.
His skin should be
wrinkled
but it isn't,
his face is as smooth as a silk
sheet.
He should be emaciated
but he's not
Let's face it, his body odor is
unbearable.
He is, well
something of a dead issue
even now as he walks his favorite
dead dog
down main street
holding the leash near soiled fire
hydrants
watching the traffic with a stiff,
vacant
stare.
All the neighbors comment:
"What's he doing now?”
“Walking his dog?”
“He should know better
and keep to his own kind."
That old dead fool
walking his favorite dead
dog
this one last time.
