The Plague on TV
The kid keeps asking if there are rhetorical questions
in the afterlife, and does the little voice go on chattering
inside the headless? In whose language? Do the gods pray
to each other? What do they ask for? What do they offer
to sacrifice? It’s the 29ᵗʰ of February, a cicada droning
on the sill and a plague on TV and the kid going on and on,
but it feels good to sit here buzzing inside myself watching
TV at the odd end of Florida, February, a cicada moaning
on the sill and a plague on, and the kid going on and on,
so I go on debating with myself whether it’d be better
to die of the plague or to die of anything other than
the plague during a plague, and I begin getting nervous
for the kid and myself as remembered by the kid
riding shotgun in the lead car behind my hearse,
and I begin to wonder how long I’ll miss the view
from inside my own head in any kind of afterlife,
of the other side of my face, of the kid as seen
through my face, of TV and the cicada like a little
winged ambulance bawling on the sill purpled
with dusk, meaning my view of everything, I keep
asking and asking, but the kid’s decamped to his bunk,
the cicada receding into the soft quarantine of night,
and the TV is talking to itself again, and the plague is there
making its gross calculations like a god sizing up a lamb.
