I suppose I should
make a list of the things
I don’t very much like.
I’m an optimist so the list
won’t be all that long, though
it grows the more I think about it.
I was going to put
my ex-wife on the list
but she doesn’t like me
and I have no feelings
for her either way.
So it’s down to
autocrats and would be
autocrats, and customer service
people who have no idea
of what that title entails.
Oh, yes, and lima beans
and cauliflower pizza crust.
I am waiting patiently for her to tell me what I need to do next today. I’m sure she’ll be along shortly with a list. Hopefully, today it will be a short list. And I know that no matter how quickly I get to whatever task it is she assigns, she will, watching me like a hawk, point out my shortcomings in its completion. And I am never done on time. Still, she is largely forgiving of my errors, she says, because that is just the way cats are taught.
He knew it was time
to call it a career when
they handed him the list
of what he could not say,
what terms were verbotten,
what topics were off limits.
Once upon a time he watched
the fight over textbooks,
how they approached sensitive
subjects like race, war, equality,
but he could teach around
whatever strictures they
would ignorantly impose.
But now whole topics,
entire aspects of history
were off limits, and he knew
he would not be an educator
but merely an indoctrinator and he
wanted no part of that.
A Rabbi once told me that
if you want to get to heaven,
something Jews don’t believe in,
you must atone to those you
have harmed, or injured
before you die.
I’ve started making a list,
and it feels like I am in
some wierd version of
High Fidelity, but mine
is more than a top five.
I’ve made a few efforts,
some accepted, some not,
but I have come to realize
that if I don’t believe in heaven
and I was a lawyer for years,
there is no way I am
getting in, atoning or not.
I realize now just
how old I have gotten,
no laughing any longer
at the old men always
tucking pills into a sorter
neatly marked by day and time,
for I now do my own
weekly, the number of pills
seeming to propogate by month.
I suppose it is time
to begin working in earnest
on the playlist for my funeral.
I’ll be damned if I
will have an organist
and somber melodies
although I may be
damned regardless, but
that is something beyond me.
It will be a long list,
but you can suffer for a bit,
and you know that I will conclude
with my favorite songs
in their full jam band version
by the Grateful Dead.
A good friend, who we had
not seen in COVID time, visited
and we smiled when we saw
that she was reading Heidi,
catching up she said on a too
abbreviated childhood, one
sacrificed to circumstance
My grandson, soon enough
ten, says he is reading
Beowulf, though not the Heaney
translation, so there are two
more books on my books
you must read before you die list.
Despite reading regularly,
the list grows ever longer,
and I am beginning to think
that if I must complete it,
it may be my best shot, my
only real shot at immortality.
Consider them very carefully
for you will have only this chance
and you don’t want to add
those which ought not be included
or be forever burdened by those
you overlooked or misassumed
you wanted to retain.
When you are quite certain
you are finished, that your list
is exactly as you wish it,
that all your dislikes and regrets
are properly delineated, then
walk slowly to the river,
pen at the ready, and write them
with a precise hand upon the water.
They clearly don’t get it
and odds are they never will.
They think perhaps prayer will work
or youth will provide some
sort of immunity, maybe
an executive decree, good
luck with that given the
swinging there to that old White House,
with the ridiculous spiked fence
in the middle of an avenue named
first state that’s actually a Commonwealth.
They can’t imagine I have a list
And all I do is make pickups
and drop offs, no thinking, no planning
just show up, tie up to the pier
and then it’s off down and across the River
all day and night, in and out
for a payment you ‘llonly make
begrudgingly, as if I care, for I
have a family to feed too, remember.
I called my mother the other day
and she did not answer, which
she would always do when I called.
The dead, I concluded, no longer
play by the rules they did
when they were still alive.
Of course she will call me soon,
disrupting my sleep, and chastise
me for not trying again.
But she will quickly slip into
reading the list of what
she expects from me, for
either living or dead,
mother’s expectations must
always be met, no matter what.
an old writer and his words 