Some Lofty Poetic Names All Scrambled
(Lit Play: Lots of Mad Resemblances Come)*
Men Can Live Distantly
(Edna St. Vincent Millay)
Were I to learn that you had died,
I’d mourn your absence, dear.
I’d crave to feel you by my side
Perhaps three times a year!
Pink Hair Pill
(Philip Larkin)
The balding of my head began
In nineteen forty-three.
It never bothered me.
A sternly bespectacled, bald-headed man
Is what I was meant to be.
Stuff your effeminate hair pills and kits.
Stuff them deep. Stuff them hard. You know where.
I don’t mind that my scalp hosts a glare.
I shall never be one of those elegant gits
Who think heads are for carrying hair.
Ode to a Large, Slimy Ulcer
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
My genial stomach fails.
A tidbit that regales
The palette feels like swallowing an ember,
And what my gut can stand
Is maddeningly bland.
I haven’t used my taste buds since September.
Gosh, An End
(Ogden Nash**)
Is it better to keep being or not, I often wonder.
Killing myself could lead to a peaceful sleep, but what if it turns out to be a blunder?
Is it nobler to suffer the slings and arrows and natural shocks and fardels (whatever those are)
that keep coming like addendum after addendum,
Or just end ’em?
Life is full of whips and scorns and pangs and delays and contumely,
None of which can be thought about other than glumely,
Which tends to give suicide an appearance of behoovement.
But will death be an improvement?
We’re told the afterlife will be heavenly, but more often than not this is said
By people who have never actually been dead.
Death is a country from which no traveler has ever come back,
So it’s hard to know how to get there and what to pack.
For all we know, trouble here, however hard, ‘ll
Seem easy compared to an after-death fardel.
That’s what makes resolution’s native hue
(A good strong primary color, like red, or yellow, or blue)
Grow pale with thought, and that’s
What makes us all such scaredy-cats.
*Inspired by Francis Heaney’s Holy Tango of Literature
**Channeling Hamlet