POEM: The Last of It

There are those signs that you see
PLEASE NO PARKING
FUNERAL
in front of those overly
sincere funeral homes.
(How do we have the nerve
to call them "homes"?
Just whom do they house?
And who sits around the dinner
table, arguing politics,
getting into family arguments?
Who storms out the door?
And who fights for the bathrooms?)

We bark our orders from beyond the grave
we try to pull strings that in life we would
never have the power to pull.

it's all a matter of our position on the great food chain -
from single cell plankton on one end
to spirit seduced by seance,
grieved over,
missed and mourned
on the other