Photography © Edward S. Gault

 

Did You Hear?

We want celebrity deaths and open cemetery gates
With a video feed and tagged photos
Of the body
Ricocheting off that initial feeling of
Dumbstruck discovery,
Like first lights outside
The womb,
The starved
Shock
And dearly policed torrent of memories that follow.
Those first conversations are electrified
Aren’t they?
Where are you?
Did you hear?
Those bus tour tweets that show how much we care,
How well we know their oeuvre,
Their skinned narrative.
I try not to partake
But it’s difficult to
Avoid
When you’re half
Alive
And hear someone
Knocking.
The one I’m waiting for is
Tom Waits
Not because I want him
To die
I just think I’m going to take that one
Particularly hard
And all the conversations I have about him
Are going to be so damn rich.
I wonder who I’ll tell first
Where are you?
Did you hear?
And maybe then I’ll finally get people to listen
To his music
Kentucky Avenue and Another Man’s Vine
In The Neighbourhood and On The Nickel.
He was inspired by the Beats and Bob, you know,
And he got married at a 24 hour chapel
After a week’s romance
And made it work.
Yeah, his stuff is transformative
But not as much as
Death.

 

A former high school English and Film teacher, Michael Paul Kozlowsky is the author of Scarecrow Has a Gun. His children’s novels, written as M.P. Kozlowsky, include Juniper Berry and The Dyerville Tales from HarperCollins, and Frost and Rose Coffin from Scholastic Press.

Edward S. Gault is a poet and fine arts photographer living in Brighton, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Oddball Magazine, Spectrum, Wilderness House Literary Review, Interlude, Currents, and Encore. His poetry collection, Airhead and Other Poems was published this year by Read and Green Books.