It all seems so business
so pleasantly polite...so black-hides-the-blue..so completely unlike you.
I close my eyes and think of it often
the alternate to the unsmiling coffin
You don’t want a poem about how great you are
You want everyone singing Green Day, with Joe on guitar
You don’t want flowers falling without a sound
You want shotgunned cans of Hamm’s thrown on the ground
You don’t want scratchy collars and palms all sweaty
You want retro Nikes and confessions of confetti
You don’t want hiccups and heartache
You want plastic forks and a Costco cake.

But instead
I’m left with red-hot
blurry stinging
Perfect gray
Sad sky ringing
A gaping hole in the dug-up dirt
Filled with mounds of rock-hard hurt.
They see a nice young man
in a green striped tie
Gone too soon,
who knows why
It’s tragic
but their world keeps turning
They sympathize
but their eyes stop burning.

They don’t see a little brother open the doors
of your Jack and Jill
because his Jack has gone and left a chill.
So he can fall asleep,
he turns on the bedside light,
pretends you’re up reading
and everything is right.
You and World War II guns
always late into the night.