Body Count New Year 2009

Each day he cuts out
the New York Times dead in Iraq
and places them in a green metal dish
to rest with the rest
of the silence in between.

The Grief Man

He had an idea for the New Year and he knew he could make money on it. He rented a sky blue pickup truck and stuck signs on the doors that read:

THE GRIEF MAN
Pick Up and Hauling, Day or Night
No Grief Refused.
Reasonable Rates
Telephone 1-800 NO-GRIEF

He drove around the neighborhoods for weeks. At first people peered through their curtains or went in the house when he slowed down, but one day a small woman in her seventies waddled down her front walk and asked him if he could take the memory of her dead husband.

The Grief Man smiled and she wrote a check. He put the dead husband memory in the truck and drove off slowly, partly out of a sense of honor and hopefully, so the rest of the neighborhood would see that he really was serious and write down his phone number.

Of course the woman got on the phone and the word spread. Within days his phone was ringing off the hook. He could barely fill his orders. A man wanted to get rid of his son's drug addiction, another man wanted to be relieved of the embarrassment of wearing a hairpiece, not the hair piece mind you, the embarrassment thereof. A child called. It seems the kid down the block got a tan cowboy hat and he got a red one when all he really wanted was AUTO THEFT. He couldn't throw his red one away because everyone would know. Parents called in droves to rid themselves of the worry of what to do about leaving their children alone. Alcoholics called at all hours of the day and night. The back of his truck reeked with alcoholic grief going into withdrawal without people. Then there were the sick, the elderly and the fleeced, which had lost their entire savings to Illness or inscrutability. The Grief Man left them at the curb with cherubic smiles. A single mother wanted traffic removed. A fish cutter said he never wanted to see another fish; a fast food worker wanted the smell of French fries removed forever. A set of twin women in their forties wanted to rid themselves of their likeness.

The Grief Man took credit cards. The Grief Man bought two cell phones. He didn't need to advertise. The Grief Man could barely fill his orders. The Grief Man had to rent a warehouse.

A woman from Pembroke Pines, Florida said she was too hot. A man from Pulaski, New York said he was too cold. The Grief Man agreed to take heat and cold via overnight express. A Chicago banker wanted the entire New Year removed and the Grief Man devised a way to do it on the installment plan with balloon payments. Best he could do given such short notice. The banker agreed. A Las Cruces, New Mexico woman, wanted slipperiness taken out of satin sheets. Children with dead pets called from all over the world. A little girl from Adams, Massachusetts wanted a sun fish she caught, cleaned and buried in the back yard the summer before, to be put back in the lake. A therapist from Los Altos, California wanted to know if the Grief Man could remove the need, "To talk it all out." A man who said he represented a large government agency he refused to identify, called regarding the elimination of war and poverty, but left no return phone number.

The Grief Man got rich. He picked up a too-late Eminem record collection, sixteen truckloads of Brittney Spears supermarket Musak and one volume of poetry by Robert Service, four hundred thousand truckloads of used Harry Potter videos, a four by eight mini-storage unit full of 1960s memories and stadium-size tonnage of books about the uselessness of the sixties. The Grief man couldn't fill the number of orders for the removal of grief over the Martin Luther King and Kennedy assassinations, but he managed to put a dent in it.

So it was, on New Years Eve at 11.57 p.m. that he drove his truck up to the side of his house, full of last minute pickups ; cockroach problems, found money, winning lottery tickets, missed chiropractic appointments. He felt exhausted, but happy. He gazed wearily at the Christmas tree aglow by the fireplace in the adjoining living room. He sat down at the kitchen table and opened a beer. He watched the smoky gas escape from the top. He picked up the bottle and brought it to his lips, when the phone rang. He paused to wonder who it could be and he promised himself he would not answer. He listened to the phone ring, one two three rings; he wanted to drink his beer. He picked up the phone.

It was the little boy of the red cowboy hat. The Grief Man wanted to know what he was doing up at that hour and the boy said he'd been to church and the minister told him to be grateful for what he had instead of always wanting what somebody else had and could the Grief Man return his red hat? The Grief Man hesitated for a second before obliging. After all, it was the New Year and this was a little boy. Little boys don't always understand what, or why they do what they do.

The Grief Man looked at the nice hot chocolate that he hadn't even sipped. . Now he had to go out and get the red hat, but before he could get his coat on, the other phone rang again. The kitchen clock read 12.09 a.m. It was the New Year. The woman on the phone was crying. She said she was Susan of the Susan and Sylvia twins. She said no one recognized her without Sylvia and would he please, please return her to, at least, a shadow of her former self.

By 12.20 a.m. the phones never stopped. The fast food worker said she needed the smell of French fries on her skin to feel alive, the alcoholics wanted their drinks, parents wanted their children to go somewhere, anywhere, so they could be alone, the cold man from Pulaski couldn't stand sweat, the hot woman from Pembroke Pines couldn't stop shivering, the banker called to say the balloon payments on the removal of New Year had given him no place to begin, nor end, and the widow called to say she discovered the Grief Man's phone number on the refrigerator door and it reminded her that she needed to cry, but she couldn't remember what for, so would it be possible, to return what it was she had forgot to remember, immediately.

Thereafter the Grief Man's phone never stopped ringing as he drove frantically and forever into the night of nights, the forwarding of calls jamming his truck phone, his ears, his very life; the calls to the Grief Man waxing toward a hopeful dawn.

Dead Man

Dead before he hit the sidewalk, gray teeth, bloodless gums
His mouth permanently agape at the sky
The usual crowd gathers. A young man with two day beard
sharp chin, arms folded, thick bleached blond woman,
say thirty-six in the blue print dress who parked
her Honda across the street stands off to the left
beyond the young man and me. She seems
at loss as to why her life is interrupted on the way
to church, or going home from “His Place”
along with the rest of us who wait to see for sure.

I know he’s dead. I’ve driven ambulance, cut down hangings
pulled heads out of ovens, delivered babies in snow and he’s dead
as surely and perceptively as grass without water dies.
He’s dead. Head back, little body askew on the sidewalk
His blue shorts show no signs of mess, his banty legs awry,
tee-shirt not sweating through. No one knows who he is. No ID.
Does anyone know first aid? And I who know first aid
stand aside while an entourage of well-meaning
men and women surge or approach cautiously to the end
of the no named man lying on the half-shaded sidewalk
head at the foot of a sapling, eyes half closed and vacant.

A tall muscular gay man with shaved head and earrings, stripped
to the waist, rollerblades right up to the corpse and I say again, “He’s dead.
Leave the blanket. Don’t cover the face. It freaks people out.”
One guy with thin moustache misses what I say and rips the blanket off.
And I repeat, “Don’t cover his face,” then he drops the blanket.
The roller blader pulls the blanket off, takes the dead mean’s pulse
with his thumb which says to me, he doesn’t know his thumb has a pulse
of its own and no, he won’t be able to revive this man, who’s Latin
say five feet-five, hands beginning to wax up, cool down, gray hair settling in.
He begins to look unreal like he’s in a casket and the roller blader knocks
some CPR on his chest, tentatively touches the dead man’s face, tips his
head back, looks inside his mouth, shakes his head, says "purple" and before
sirens become trucks, cops and oxygen he skates to his immortal day.


This man reminds me of my own death, a face with no name lying
on a strange street in a stranger neighborhood. The day I left home,
the day I left my wife, left California, came back, went home.
The day I got tired of trying to make sense of it, when the carpet rolled out
or upand I wasn’t sure why. And now, just a stroll down Sunday, what better
day the sirens come calling, red trucks blast and loom, young men step down
swing off the great metal with sure and measured stepstheir paraphernalia
designed to give us another whack, a chance to hold on.

Perhaps it’s their sure step, the swarming blue-eyed harmony, an act
of life hovering, a strange enclave of angels even when they know
it’s too lateand it is too late. They circle and dig from their
little black bags some accoutrements for life and this time
it’s not mine to perform; it’s theirs to pretend.
They lock on the oxygen, defibrillate and push, take out a stethoscope
to pronounce him after I’ve pronounced him and I’m hard pressed to speak.
I have passed the baton. My wisdom let’s them sign the final say.
I walk away. This man’s face tilts skyward, presses my mind.
A touch of larceny and trickery. He unwittingly and finally marks
what is and isn’t and what trails this sweltering Sunday
toward home, toward light, toward ever-sweet tomorrow

Homage to a Flea

Somewhere between yesterday morning
and last night, a flea slipped
in my armpit while I rode
my bike from the optometrist
to the bookstore to the park
and around the block after dark.
Somehow this invisible
free flying insect got caught in
my snag of everyday life
my daily bag of tricks without an airbag
life insurance or a last supper.

Unbeknownst to me
it bit and bit leaving no itch
just dry red markers
of attempted escape
from my churning arm
my restless self.

How heroic this tiny flea
alone in peculiar sweat
awash in dark spinning,
chugging bed of hair and skin
Searching for a way out
bumping and biting, ripping, racing
against a time it doesn’t know
eating at a wall of constant motion
or falling off crushed and wing torn.

While my universe pedals on
as the earth passes under a silver moon
wondering how to breathe or drink
or spill, rotating into the endless
speck of it all, without a name,
or a bug to pin it on.