That Delicious Engagement

Originally posted 5/30/2013.

Ask me once
what I want from life,
and I usually say
that what I want from life
is to be alive
until it’s more right
that I be dead,
at which point
I will be dead.  

But if you ask the question again
and ask it often enough, 
the answering of it
transforms me
through an obvious,
delighted hysteria
that anyone
would even care to ask,
and I fall into the consideration
of a delicious engagement
with the world — 
how the taste of it
may not at all be that
of ashes on my lips;

how like a first
post-virginal ecstatic sleep
each night could feel;
how like a morning
when a death sentence has been stayed
each awakening might feel.

Ask me, ask me, ask me what
I want from life — ask yourself,
I will ask you the same,
in fact let’s run through
our town asking everyone
what they want from life so many times
that there will be no choice for any of us 
but to laugh and love
and turn the streets into a banquet hall
and our stoops and yards into tables
where we can feast on the question,
reveling in the last meal we’ll ever have
before we take our last, gentle leave
of each other.