This is for those who went before

and went too soon.

The Deal Of A Lifetime

Hey God,
let’s make a swap.
Businessman you are,
I bet you’d recognize a deal.
Flesh is cheap, time priceless.
A payment up front
my seconds for my friends’ second chance.
Fancy that, this hostage situation
could never become a mexican standoff,
You’ve got all the guns,
your hot lead against my demands.
Sick bastard you are, you made me a poet
my mouth a human funnel for their screams.

The dead don’t rest. They thrash about in our memories,
frozen, framed in one moment

too perfect to grip.

You stole their ghosts
and memories now melt from my eyes
lost by a mind you designed.

Tonight, thick wings that belong to no one beat
against my mind’s windowframe.
Knocking for entrance to sleep –
beggars on All Saint’s Day
as we stand transfixed at the picture window with a graveyard view.
Clockwork burns their faces,
white skin turned orange then ashen,
dust to dust.
Hey God, I thought you had a sense of value.
Why trade your craft for the ashes of the earth?

Hey God, let me walk to your house
because my ex-lovers have so much to lose
lips they haven’t kissed and through clenched
teeth, I wish them love they never found lurking
in my shadowy corners.
Will giving myself buy them a few more years?

Hey God, carry me away to your house
by long fall or human malice
or car crash – lost to the speed,
my veins filled with one last adrenal scream.
So I can taste Kevin’s last moments
and know that this was a good trade.

So God, let me go quietly to your house.
I make you an offer with my feet against the road.
I can’t march without them,
so can I swap every step I might’ve taken
to put Kevin, Paul, Sara, Jordan, Anne, Daniel
back on their dusty paths?
Can I add up every year and divide them amongst those willing
to leave you in your quiet estate?
I’ve raised my fist to you for so long
now I have only
empty
open
hands
full of surrender.
Such small portions you gave, God.
Such small portions
and to give them more,
I’d call you Lord.
A sacrifice is a sacrifice
but a wolf can never be a shepherd.

11/17/05