the end

Item, as it now stands, by my mother's arrangement, my corpse will be cremated, its ashes funneled into a hungry urn destined to stand among the ranks of fresh-cut flowers, potted plants and the ashes of her father, who, in the armor of his own urn of burnished silver, stands tirelessly at attention, on the front lines of a sunlit bay window.
***
Since I, myself, lack my grandfather's greed for the glories of war, and since I consider myself master of my own fate, let me address the manner in which I would like my bag of bones to be handled. Being far more the poet-- solitary but sensuous-- than the warrior who wishes to raise flames to the last, I would prefer a down-to-earth burial to cremation.
***
I request that the funeral preceding my burial be preceded in turn by an open-casket viewing; but there's nothing to fear, my dear future squeamish relatives and friends, because I request that my corpse be fitted with and laid to rest in a full gorilla suit-- professionally hand-crafted of whatever fabric and fiber at the time of my demise is most resistant to decomposition, but which does not hinder its having the authentic look of a gorilla-- rather than be primped, patted and powdered mannequinesque and clothed in whatever happens to be the current fashion in formal-wear for men; this display will not only splash some color on the darkest emotions of my mourners-- I thank you few for coming-- it will also simplify the duties of the ever-busy mortician, to whom I wish, in advance, a lovely day.
***
Think of it, my friends! The quasi-human palms of my hairy hands solemnly folded over the dark, mysterious mountain of my chest! And only my own still lids visible through the eye-holes of my mask!
***
Yes! A satin and lace lined coffin! And an invincible gorilla suit!

I have changed my mind, yes, have indulged in that luxury of the living, and have decided against burial in favor of cremation, after which my ashes should be placed and sealed inside a cube, a large die, pun intended, 6"x6"x6" perhaps, that symbol of chance, of probability, so that my love and I, after our time, may become dice.

Item, that crazy, upbeat music which frequently follows occupied caskets down the streets of New Orleans . . . let it follow this book, this little book against death . . . not because its occupant is headed for the promised land-- for he wasn't big on such promises-- but because he could think of no better way to thumb his nose at noseless Death, because he knew no better way-- faced with the inevitability of his being caught, with his pants down, by death-- to moon death. . . .
***
Here, with your help, chilly-fingered reader, I press hard my bare buttocks-- brain-shaped!-- against this window to the netherworld!

A thumbing of one's nose in the face of death, Death personified, who, as we all know, doesn't, himself, have a nose.
***
A nose to follow through this mysterious, magnificent, ridiculous world; though it points, however accusingly, at death.
***
To sniff is to become conscious of the cargo of an inward breath. To breathe is necessary for life, but to sniff is to live!
***
Nose-that twitching trigger finger of pistol memory.
***
Delicious nostrils . . .

The similar ring to the music played for a burlesque striptease and the New Orleans funeral procession. Do we wait in wide-eyed anticipation of the unknown, a rebirth, the land of milk and honey that is the naked woman's body? O the molting, the foliating. . . .

Rather than taps, play The Stripper during the moment my casket is lowered into the grave.

On war and how losing limbs will make you less able to woo women: Listen to The Pogues' Waltzing Matilda, read Wilfred Owens' Disabled.

The coolest obit photo: the guy was wearing mirrored sunglasses, a red beret, and big-ass grin.

Panic, paralysis at the precariousness of existence. . . .

When I step back and look at my life as if from the company of stars, I see no reason to feel anything but fortunate; I was born of kind and generous parents a caucasian male into the Roman Empire of the 20th Century, am healthy and relatively attractive to women, had the freedom to make an intellectual and romantic playground of both undergraduate and graduate school, have a successful and serendipitous career, a life full of women, travel, art, and ideas, and have never been forced by circumstance into a life I loathed.

A picture of an island reminds me, 20 years later, how much I wanted to live on one, utterly alone, when I was a teenager.

I look back on my life and am amazed by how much of it I've wanted to spend alone.

A life, simple, clean, and minimal.

I had to relocate; my apartment lease was up and promised to the landlord's daughter. I drove about town, trying to get a feel for the type of place in which I would feel most at home. Ah, there it was! I decided to inquire. I walked only as far as the sign, which read: Hollow View Rest Home.

Would never want to be an old crank who curses the world as having gone to hell. Nor would I want to be an optimistic old fool. Hope to be an old man who never forgets that the eve of a civilization's demise historically is its most thrilling.

Optimistic on the smallest scales, pessimistic on the largest.

It's true, as agnostics say, that even atheists claim a certain gnosis, knowledge; however, they have a leg up on theists: How in good conscience believe in something when there's evidence of nothing-that long, still corpse laid at our feet?

He never metaphysics he didn't like.

Oblivion: a word by turns terrifying and soothing.

From the window of his dark apartment, he looks out on the universe of streetlights, as from within an extinguished sun.

Decree: Henceforth, would-be suicides must first read Neruda's odes aloud to a panel of peers.

In vanitas paintings of the 1600s, those tables piled high with skulls, jewels, books . . . How my heart leapt when I noticed the books . . . and understood their presence.

Mustn't be so hard on myself; noone really knows how life should be lived.

A conception of death: One sits in a pitch dark room, writing by feel with a pen one suspects probably contains black ink, on a black sheet of paper one imagines to be white.

Our attraction to the abyss. Death is the one we mistake, years later, for our first love-- Birth. We mistake the casket for the cradle, the moist grave for the womb.

Her mourners were saddened to see that today, the day of her funeral, she was having what they would term a "bad hair" day.

Today a new resident arrived in Laurel Hill Cemetery, where I jog every Saturday morning. Circling the party of the formally attired, I felt the urge, for levity's sake, to approach and ask what the occasion was.

I have the philosophy of a man who, having twisted and turned in the spider web of ideas, begins a very satisfying laugh at the hopelessness of his situation.

This notebook would be unnecessary if I could write laughter, that ultimate articulation.

Jogging in a cemetery . . . the urge to to run hurdles over headstones.

Dead-end footpath in the cemetery.

Heard tersely said in the cemetery: "Joey, stop steppin' on y'r gran'dad!"

Those old gravestones which are so tall and thin, as though they'd grown emaciated over the years.

His tombstone was carved into a fist, a fist with its middle finger raised.

Your tombstone replaces your face. That manly square jaw you always wanted . . .

Epitaph to be Carved on a Tombstone:
He chased older women
when young and younger
women when old he chased
older women when
young and younger women
when old and older
women when young he chased
younger women when
old and older women
when young and younger
women when old he chased
older women when
young and younger women
when old and older
women when young he chased
( . . . right into the ground)

Sweet, sad decline down the twisty-turny carnival slide of Fellini's City of Women.

What do you want to see, to watch nostalgically, on the sputtering reel?

Cemetery tombstones, chiseled and filed-- manicured fingernails of Mother Earth. To what end do we hoard our dead? To reserve a place in her palm: to be held in this world balled up tight as the fist of a miser: to hope one is worth something.

No headstone, but a footstone.
Come stand on my head--
quiet explosion of grass.

Cemetery in the snow. I walk to a tombstone, then walk backward in my footprints to give no sign of return.

A preoccupation with beginnings--my notes.
A preoccupation with asses and shit--endings.
I'm lying in the fertilizer, the pile, looking up.

As microorganisms, or insects with their pincers and siphons, attack his cadaver, so mourners surround him, masticating his memory.

Giant African Land Snail poop.

hum-an.
hum-or.

Fuck time! Fuck mortality! Why we fuck.

Reading in the evening, by the light of an imperceptibly setting sun. Looking up once the words become indistinguishable from the page: euphoria of eyes bathed in twilight. It is, I imagine, like dying a good death.

Aphoristic writer, unrequited lover, pessimistic Esperantist.

The pleasure of flirting with women is to see them become conscious of their own beauty in an instant.

Flirting with ideas, with relationships.

Romance and writing. Flirtations and fragments. Writing fragments is like flirting with writing; flirting, like creating fragments of romance. But flirting and fragments, both filled with possibility. Addicted to beginnings to the bitter end.

The impermanence of it all.

Ici repose.

Gray, pink, blue twilight walk along the beach . . .