John Milbury-Steen

My Uncle's Death 
 

He told his wife that she should let him die
on a fold-out bed in the living room.  Asked why
his death bed was a guest bed, he replied
the bedroom window like a belovèd oil
had rising sun behind the reeds him dead
remembered in the foreground of might spoil.

We were there to pay our last respects,
but his respect of his bay window view
struck me as a preacher acting up,
as certainly his body, he suspected
would mar a marsh, would be an actual prop
to rhetoric of rising sun backdrop.

That was his last gesture, very nice,
subversive, inconvenient, humble, graced
with that acknowledgement we are but guests,
but his last words….  Alas, he heard my mom
needed to buy a washer at low cost,
opined Montgomery Wards was best, and died.

Gossip guessed that huge bay window in
his room had set him back a pretty penny.

Juno Moneta

My mother (thrift) allows her flocks of geese
to roam about my Rome in packs.  They see
all spending as the sneak attacks of Gauls
against my flanks.  A barely audible noise
will set off their cacophony of honks
to wake me up to mobilize my ranks.

Especially in the marketplace these beaks
nip, goose, pinch, bite and generally harass
my ass when I desire something.  It's
never nice and never pretty fighting
forward through that honky mass to get
up to the register to pay the price.

Others spend their presidents in peace.
I have no bills except the bills of geese.
 

Woman vs. Head
 
Birth is hard, notes cheerleading dad,
and all the gynecologists have warned
if heads were larger, women would not be wide
enough to get that smarter creature born,
for birth essentially is birth of the head,
once done, the slippery, trailing rest can slide.

When I was carried, I was hard to bear.
When I was ready, I was a racking curse.
When I was born, my mother knew the worst.
The doctor cut her so I might occur.
That was not the only, but the first
injury my intellect caused her.

That was the crowning insult and since then,
a time, another time and on and on,
whenever I felt myself too drowning in
the Bellyanschauung of her amnion,
I had to rip me out and get her torn
to demonstrate ta-da! I had been born.

Consolation
 
Bankrupt, healthrupt, loverupt, talentrupt
you are and, being empty, binge on crap,
but here I am, my friend, to cheer you up,
so slap me five:
at least you never will become liferupt
while you're alive.

Fortune's tits, as old men know, are apt
to flatten and she goeth saggy-cupped,
but just get over it.  The cup you sipped,
the fuller bra,
being empty, cheerfully adapt
with tra-la-la.

Once you're dead and your soft parts are robbed,
the meat of you being a lootable robe,
and you become too charnel dry to sob,
the bone of you will sit
in dust and shit
incredibly more stoically than Job.

In this hardscrabble scree where you are cramped
with little forage but to crop the cropped,
pray for the efficient hawk as hoped
so death at will
can execute the end to be abrupt --
a clean kill.

The only consolation to be chirped
is everybody dies, so all are gypped,
even those in church above the crypt.
I then conclude
that all flesh is corrupt, indeed CO-rupt --
together screwed.

Heaven's fare has grunted cheer and crapped.
Co-ripped off, co-reapèd and co-snipped
all will be and that should cheer you up,
the common blow,
the only consolation I accept
being co.