Last Act

Many of you are back from your Easter Sunday celebration, and The Poem of the Week is here for you. This poem is being offered in honor of my stepbrother, who died on Saturday, surrendering to the ravages of a long, cruel series of illnesses that finally wore his body down. For those who know me personally, don’t worry when you read this. I’m not offering this as the blueprint for my own exit. Memento mori.

Last Act

I used to fantasize that, terminally old,

in a final act of awesome

I’d take a raucous late-60s Dodge or Plymouth,

gas-jet-blue paint and glasspack exhaust,

scream it off a high desert cliff,

and going Louise one better, pack it tight with dynamite,

mash the button mid-flight

with camera rolling

to immortalize the bloom, the boom,

the grand exit.

Back then, there was a VHS camcorder steady in the sand,

whirring calmly in the ensuing quiet,

(retrospectively, perhaps, the most beautiful moment)

recording the crawling black smoke plume

until the tape clicked off

to be discovered by my admiring survivors,

but I didn’t foresee high-def GoPros,

maybe a drone following me down,

a posthumous YouTube viral moment,

or the FBI breaking in my door at 4am on the big day,

the humiliation of geriatric zip tie confinement,

trying to explain that my giant car bomb

was the world’s fastest euthanasia machine

in terms of killing and the quarter mile.

p.ferenczi