I stopped by today

To listen to others

Speak of your life

You, for your part, were absent.

You had left a deposit of dust on a coffin shaped piece of real estate

Located in the Land of Ultimate Democracy.

Your MBA, your CPA, Your J.D., Your Honorable Discharge

Are like bread crumbs I followed to the locust thin shell of your body,

Its grimly sealed lips speaking yet of the agony of a long slow death.

 

We are dancers.

We enter a stage.

We dance across it, and disappear.

We step into whatever music is playing,

improvising our moment as if we owned

the only choreography ever played.

We step upon the toes of the living and the dead,

unconscious this reckless dance

is danced by all to equal acclaim.

 

Names and dates on stone, adorned

With faded plastic flowers and helium balloons

emptied and limp looking to the sky.

Jesus was right.  Let the dead bury the dead.

He too had no time for graveyards, except to set a madman free.

Some real estate, he knew, was just too toxic for remedial action.