Stale air smells of dead flowers and formaldehyde.
It’s cramped and dark, hot in the summer, cold in the winter.
Not much of a view either.
We believe in the Book of Revelation here
so we’ll know when to claw through our velvet-lined caskets,
emerge from dirt and rock, meet friends. Do lunch.
For now the only sound is from pacemakers
buried within the lifeless, keeping time with an iambic pentameter
Da DUM da DUM da DUM.
There will be no poetry reading tonight.
All assume the same pose, hands clasped, right over left,
not counting Nick in Section A who lost an arm at the mill.
Women wear fine dresses, corsages; Bony fingers clasp rosary beads.
Men in fine silk ties and Sunday-best suits,
except Fred in Section C who got buried without his pants on
because the funeral home director also wore a 42-long.
There’s Harold in B, whose wife Marigold had her name chiseled next to his.
No one’s told him, but he’s in for a long wait.
She just got remarried – to his best friend Jake.
They say the dead have a story to tell.
That’s true, but we can’t because our lips are glued shut.
Plus, there’s the matter of all that dirt on top of us.
Even if we yelled really loud, no one would hear.
That’s why, come Judgment Day, we will have our say.
Floyd will tell you of the Great War.
Inez of the two sons she lost to influenza.
Willie of how he came within a whisker of making the Gas House Gang.
Rita of the book she wrote.
and me, of the house I built.
It still stands, overlooking the cemetery where
we wait and gaze into pungent darkness.
