Immortality You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts every third or fourth morning, cover those non-nut nuts with blueberries because they have gobs of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss every other night to inhibit heart infections, use mouthwash several times-a-day to ward-off armies of oral bacteria, walk the dog every night for a mile, eat an orange daily, take your Lipitor horse pill, your Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi- vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut your Metoprolol in half and take it for your arrythmias, and you do all this instead of church, instead of fingering rosary beads and telling yourself that somewhere near our galaxy’s big black hole Jesus and Mary are floating around without oxygen masks or spacesuits, and it’s in this way that you avoid the anvil of disease, the miasma of malaise, the numinosity of pneumonia—in this way you make sure never to die, you make sure to live forever and ever. Amen. Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry ...
great draft. i would only tinker a bit if at all. ending is fabulous. the only line where the meter seems a tad off is '...basin you catch it in'. also couldn't tell if that line break was intentional or due to formatting. or is that some kind of concrete and intentional break? at any, rate, that little bit stuck in my craw. otherwise, the whole scans fine for me. 'cease and decyst' is a little cute based on the other lines, but i can live with it. i wonder if that phrase can be hinted at using the same sounds with its explicit usage? just my two cents. ignore as necessary.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Gerry. I appreciate you reading this. I wanted the stark two-letter line, but now I dunno. . .
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