In black tie and shrouds
an audience crowds
into seats beneath bone candelabra.
They’ve come here to view
a rare pas de deux
known as the real Danse Macabre.

Prom 1965
My hair was sprayed
So high gloss
It looked as if it had been painted shut.

When my mother wasn’t looking,
I’d open the pages and find the one
with Lowly the Worm holding that
cupcake, and I’d apply pink tongue
to pink cupcake. You’d think I’d have
been disappointed, but, deep within,
I located the flavor of strawberries,
and maybe a hint of lemon, topped with
whirls of cream.

My steel-wheeled ride to work is human-dense
No ropes, but by our corpses tightly bound
We’re hanging suits, we’re pickets in a fence
Too close to breathe, we whisper not a sound

The sheet peels off. The spirit dies,
Yet sight persists as through a haze.
In death, we’re left with just our eyes.

A drafty basement. Bitter coffee. 12 steps.
Attendees join four-fingered hands
and bow blue, green, orange, yellow heads,
in surrender and serenity.

[This is the poem.]

If ever cheese were cheese, then surely you.
I’ll never eat another; that much is true.

His faithless cock wants to feel her sigh:
tender, deliberate, slow—
He could never love her like he wants her thighs,
her sleepy bending legs, vulgar phrases she borrows.

Odysseus stood before the food court, flummoxed, bewildered, confused,
bereft of all ideas, no clever scheme could he devise,
None of his considerable craft was of use,
Nothing he knew had prepared him for this, no experience,
Not all of his wanderings in search of his beloved Ithaca had readied him,
he was lost, adrift, as surely as if he had been storm-tossed, alone, on the wine-dark sea.