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Mike Essig Mar 2017
The coffins are sailing to a port near you.
Consider their lovely, dark sails.
how perfectly they catch the wind of death,
Think of them as bringing you precious gifts
on the Christmas Morning of Doom.
Forget the card. Be the first to unwrap yours.
Don't be concerned about returning it.
You can be sure it will fit you perfectly.
Mike Essig Mar 2017
Sometimes I think;
therefore, sometimes I am.
Sometimes I’m not sure.
Those are the best times,
when uncertainty renders me
an electron only knowable
by observing where it’s been;
a statstical state of non-being
where all wonders coexist,
where *what I might be

is more real than what I am.
A dreamer dreaming dreams
in the presence of reason.
Mike Essig Mar 2017
Send me dead flowers...*

He wanted his tombstone
to exhibit just the facts, Ma'am.

No cherubs or platitudes,
meaningless dates or military service.

Only the really important stuff.

Which toenail had the fungus.
His endless dreams of falling.
His penultimate decision about
the imminent existence of God.
How he became a hermit.
Why bourbon was the best medicine.
How, after 57 years, he found a voice.
His two or three best puns.
The virtues of solitude and celibacy.
The best *** he ever had.
Who really killed the Kennedy's.
How he came to fear cassowaries.

Just the things that really mattered.
The things that actually made a life.

This might require a billboard
intsead of a tombstone.

Little enough to ask for eternity.
Mike Essig Mar 2017
a man of no fortune with a name to come.*

Important things are happening
in the outside world of events,
but no one ever mentions you.
You have had a celebrity buzz cut.
You are not attuned to twittering.
The glasses you broke work better now.
Your hunger for renown is so great
that you can't stand to order poverty.
The cat looks at you like protein.
Your bed is an ancient dry well.
The ghosts of your memories
can't even afford clean sheets.
Do not these signal events import?
If you could but get your boyish face
out there on the Internet, someone
in that outside world might mention you,
and the virtual lottery of fame would
allow you to purchase and stockpile
marrow bones, crème brûlée and ******.
You could go out with a belch of flame,
and everyone would say they knew you
long before you were even nothing.
Mike Essig Mar 2017
t's so hard to walk in this old town anymore
since the cemetery took over every inch.
Wherever you go ghosts nibble your toes.
Dead people pretend to smile, but are resentful
Their mouths mumble but they say nothing.
The grave stones are shaped like former houses.
The lanes between them like streets you strolled.
Now the invisible exerts a ruthless domain.
There is not a nickel coke to be found.
Only empty glasses and bloodless lips.
Rather than become a flâneur of the lost,
I'd rather just stay inside and remember.
It's so hard to walk in this old town anymore.
Mike Essig Mar 2017
Don't look back.* - Satchel Paige

Once upon a time, I
stumbled and dropped my life.
It hit the world hard
and shattered into a
myriad of sharp shards.
For years I struggled
to rearrange it
using the glue of
many helpful hearts.
But after I managed,
whenever I looked into it,
the life I saw was
never quite the same
as the one I dropped.
Mike Essig Mar 2017
I dreamed I opened a bookshop
where you had to pass a reading test
before you could buy anything.
I just might have promulgated
a radiant, renaissance of literacy,
but I went broke long before that.
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