Dying Man's Eulogy

The gravedigger's getting stuck in the machine again.

Good moves break your heart and put it back together.
Great movies break your heart and make you put it back together yourself.
The same goes for people.
The same goes for everything.
The same goes for the jaws of life when they rip your body out the car
Flames looking good on your suit and tie
Pinch your lip until it bleeds, downstream tributaries of the heart
That awful terrible ugly
pulsing beast, locked away by capillary keys under the rib cage
At night your lover touches your body and gropes and gropes and gropes and then she asks
Where's the off switch
You tell her you've been searching for years, but it's in your medicine cabinet
or on the front end of a train going 80 while you're going 65
and drunk
Let's look ahead to you on the hospital bed
The heat just always made you cold, so now you freeze
and they mourn, thinking you're frozen,
when you're just going sideways.
They keep going forward.
Sideways, variations on a theme of one singular moment in time,
and that has become your life.
Still sequential, but it was steered off course. How odd.
Now you can see there is nothing to turn it off
Because even when you think it's dark or the flames out or the TV's gone black
you're wrong.
In the room next door, a baby just came out of some junkie slut's uterus
Over in Amsterdam, a mother just lit up a joint
You know where the smoke is going
It's going up and out of the burning tip, bits of fiery feral weeds mixed in, all chasing down to the stub
then to the ashtray
crushed in with the others
tossed away
giving a bit of life to a new seed of grass in 6 years.
Your big moment is half of what you thought, all turned perpendicular to itself.
The off switch, nonexistent,
your arms, nonexistent,
your reach, nonexistent,
so you cry out in a voice from a vacuum, to a space where stars void all things of sound,
your words are swallowed up in someone else's mind's makings
When you beg for mercy, it shall not come.
You are worse than alone, worse than forgotten.
You are not.