/merrillcole/

 

The knock of pale

death at the front door no longer

sets the heart pounding. Carpe diem

has become a poor alibi

for reckless behavior. Shouldn’t he

consider investing for retirement,

stocks and bonds

with those he loves?

What about the new husband?

 

The modernist imperative

that poetry be impersonal and make

Classical allusion had been

a defense mechanism

against the story, relentlessly

rammed home, where the hero

dies. Notice no “I”

in that sentence, not, or no longer,

a death sentence. Would that the self

blissfully not reappear.

 

The poet with HIV

might have resisted confessing

the purple details ad nauseum,

collecting notices he couldn’t pay,

when not well enough to work,

the men on the streets noticing

the bruises on his shins

as he sauntered by.

 

He might have suspected

turning the dead men he

had once fucked into the heroes

of stories that he would tell,

would be to make phallic

monuments to himself, would be

to betray them (whose breath

heats the back

of his neck as he writes).

 

Metro Weekly (July 29, 2021): 37; Spoon River Poetry Review
42.1 (Summer 2017): 39-40.