Funeral
Robert Michael O'Hearn
When future predicates in on your outlook
and thoughts of time travel move slowly
towards you like a sulking desert camel
When future becomes too concerned with present,
arriving at you like a flicked cigarette lighter
suddenly thrust underneath your chin
When death arrives, death may be that way too.
As your colleagues, former friends congregate,
like the visiting of a dig on an excavation site,
they will focus in on your life, as if sifting
through staid memory, all becomes more vivid.
Your minions of well meaning biographer friends
will pick apart each remembrance, numbering each
fond memory, as if marking all the found organs
on a dissected frog in high school biology class.
Most calmly poised, I will remain quite calcified
of any speech on my behalf, bury myself quietly
with unprocessed memory of books, readings, writings.
My poetry taking on the aura of a saints' relic
only more inaudible, a voice beyond silences' purity,
screaming at the world for some plenary indulgence.
