Hence it ends up with a scenario of them all getting paid,
the bums, and walking out into the eternal twilight
with gurus and girlfriends on their arms, one for each fist.
I like that way about it. I’m making believe
it never happened, that we got this way
merely by having been here forever. Millions of languages
become extinct, and not because there was nothing left to say in them,
but because it was all said too well, with
nary a dewdrop on the moment of glottal expulsion.
But now I’ve got to go put out the signs on the chairs
so folks’ll know when to stop, and where, really, only a poodle
separates us from this life and the next.
It will take us longer to get from here to there.
And the cigar band is ecstatic,
stunning in its mauve and gold obsolescence,
an erratic bloom on sheer night, faintly deleterious …