When you are dead I will change the bedsheets.
The sun will shine for five billion more years.
I will still have green eyes when you are dead
And I will drink orange juice.
I will feed the cats.

Then I will drink. My tissues
will swell with firewater.
My memories will self-immolate.
I will ***** brimstone
and my skull
will be filled with sea urchins.
I will have one scrambled
egg sandwich, dripping and
greasy with mayonnaise.
I will read Bukowski and
I will stare at pigeons in the parking lot.
I will wear purple shoes.
I will get a sunburn.
I will sob
face down in the grass
and a small child will walk past
and won't know what to do with me.
I will ride up
and down in an elevator.
I will watch the sun go splat
over this porcupine city and
bury itself in the smog.
I will watch the horizon
breathe up black until it’s night
and I will wonder
how much colder Mars is.

Then I will go home and kick myself for changing the sheets and I will take them from the laundry basket and hug them to my chest because you slept in them.

The next morning, I’ll be gone too.
(Johnny Cash knew).

Some day, some people you don’t know might get spittin’ mad at each other.
you won’t have a ****** thing to do with it.
But one morning while you discuss equality at a café on Wilshire
you might hear a terrible
BOOM
In the middle of the city
And you could spill your fair-trade iced coffee
All over your Egyptian cotton clothes.
you might be able to make it home to see
If your purebred cats are not dead
But most likely you won’t get so far.
your ice might melt,
Don’t you know?
And your faucet might leak.
your apartment could be an ocean
And nobody would care.
You might try to get away
But everyone else will do the same
And you might puff up like the Chilean Blob,
And maybe your hair will come out in tufts
And you’ll possibly die with your legs stuck out at obscene angles
On a gum-dappled sidewalk,
Ashes and fallout whiffling down around your snow-angel death scene.
Mushroom cloud don’t care how civilized you is.