A lot more people are having
funerals on rooftops now.

Everything is more somber
when you’re twenty stories above
Tuesday’s murder scene
becoming part of the culture by Thursday.

Cemeteries are old hat.
It’s all about the preacher-man trying
to scream over the airplanes and riot squad helicopters.
It’s bumping the top of your head on some of the worst
weather to ever hit you so far above sea level
and so far-gone into the wild unknown.

Graveyards belong to cigarette smokers.
The departed are going to need something special
if the casket is going to have any homerun chances
on the strength of massive angel wings and organized prayer.

It’s been nothing but good business
for those bargain-basement kids who like to blow shit up
and think the sun is just a big high school showoff.

The moment of silence alone is staggering.
Even a couple of California earthquakes couldn’t
break what a dozen or more people manage to create
and hold onto for fifteen
or even,
get this,
twenty whole minutes of their lives.

A hurricane would just hang trees and cars
in the air like weird paintings on invisible hangnails.

When it’s all over,
when the casket is going, going (get the history books ready)
gone (and that’s the ballgame, ladies and gentlemen),
the rest of your life is just a matter of flexible free will.

The guilt-free suicide rate has remained largely
and surprisingly
unaffected by what all of this does
to a mourner’s mindset.

However,
there have been reports from reliable
text message services about people
who just won’t leave the rooftops.

They stay there for days and days,
apparently quite taken with something
that they can’t describe and therefore
won’t waste their precious time trying to.

They get sickly and irritable,
and the police eventually have to be called
to take them away.

They still seem pretty satisfied overall
with how everything went.

07/28/2009

Posted on 07/28/2009
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