for Ted
The grave offers everything blacked out, a silence larger
than Helen Keller, flat out ending to every feeling, every
thought. No more scent of air before rain, or that old friend
the sound of tires rolling over wet pavement. Along with those
sacrifices, so small really, will come a cease fire in having
to wonder if someone you love dearly will take their own
life, that your eyes, so damaged by torn retinas and cataracts,
will blur into black, skin cancer on the neck suddenly
metastasizing into worse. No more job with twelve
and twenty-four hour shifts, screaming mentally disabled
twins pretending to cry because for eight seconds you
stopped paying full attention to them. It's true you've made
an appointment with a career counselor, but what career
can be developed when you've turned sixty? How fast
will they laugh after you leave their cluttered cubicle?
Lately your most enjoyable act has become watching
lousy series after lousy series on Netflix because viewing
them enables you to zone out in your exhaustion rather
than think. At least home in an urn you'll be burned
to cinders before knowing the lid has closed. Some vagrant
afternoon your daughter says we are probably no more
than parasites on earth, that we've started damaging
it so it has turned to tsunamis, hurricanes, climate change
to eliminate us the way we try to with any cancer entering
our body. It has always seemed beyond the human animal
to believe this. God after all is alive in heaven. His Angels
envelope us in safe keeping, you see them every day,
posing as saints, hanging from mirrors above dashboards.
Michael Flanagan was born in the Bronx, N.Y. Poems and stories of his have appeared in many small press periodicals across the country, most recently, Trajectory, Paterson Literary Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Chiron Review. His chapbook, A Million Years Gone, is available from Nerve Cowboy’s Liquid Paper Press. His full-length collection of poems, Days Like These, is now available online at Barnes & Noble and other select sites.