LIFE
“I didn’t expect to go downhill so fast” she said with legs turning wooden enough to build a copy of the cross she carried with motorized wheels
“I’ve got something to say to that” I said
“Sherrrrrry” Frankie Valli said
“Come come, come out tonight”
The records played for the old folks and I wound up with a strange thought, eyeing the plate, and hurled the pitch with words
wondering how to tell them without sounding a punk
that
The frogs were out last night
With the rain and all
An endless train wreck
The crashing and clashing of steel
(forever)
one long cacophony and shriek
and cry
towards the moon breaking through the stormy sky, touching the clouds with a blazing gold
LIFE
So I leaned into the mic and imitated the frogs
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
“But ya can’t go around saying that in the grocery store, it’s not polite, you’ll get tased, so we’ll express that same cry up, the song of living, genteel, with music.”
Pressed PLAY
And we danced.
Oh, my friends, I think about dying too, and the withering (and I have legs that work and I still think about this all the time and I don’t know how I’d go on with a fraction of the strength that she does and I…I…oh I don’t know.)
Football players think about touchdowns
Bankers think about lollipops
And humans, sharpened by our sufferings
think about dying
I do so much that
I forgot
that
The frogs so squished on the road and swallowed in the pond by Mr. Snake
who die more often than I do yet with a face far shorter
Sing to the moon
LIFE
They’re out again tonight in their classroom
waiting for the waning moon
With that endless trill that means something
I’m taking notes on their abandon
their joyous, unreasonable, unfathomable
abandon
LIFE.
Hey buddy, ya gonna clean this glass or what?