Guest Poet: Norm Fischer

Take death out for a walk, folks

Not on a leash but at the end of a thin thread

Outsource yourself to your friends

Who will do a better job of loving you than you ever could

They say life is brief; that

Depends on where you’re standing
How you count from where you stand
When you fall
The most complicated things remain simple
When you don’t complicate them
And when language retains
Its linear tendency
Of subjects in control of verbs acting on nouns
With occasional modifiers
That you can take or leave
What’s the world outside your window
If not a spectacle colored by your tears
Produced by the years of torture
You’ve undergone pretending
Against the odds
To be yourself
What if that world and that sense
Too of your having lived this long
And no longer
On a timeframe that spans
Only so far and in one direction
Were a feat of sleight of hand
A party trick an unattainable brush
A handshake among stars
That died long ago
And become visible only now
When you sit at a table among tables of other eaters
Who’s to say what truly occurs
It’s an embarrassment to eat it public
To be bearably alive in this in-between condition