Alligator Dreams

There is
a prescription of sorts from the doctor:
sit and think on life and enjoy what you
have left of it…
basically, just think.

Here I sit in my chair: a comfortable chair
though it’s a wee bit ratty; one that
extends, although I never do,
into the center of the room. So I
sit still and think, casually, about life.

I am also, of course, a wee bit ratty;
I suppose we match or are at least
complementary. When I think about life
my rattiness extends and falls over the side
of the chair onto the floor. I don’t bother

to pick it up when it happens.
Basically, I sit and think, and think some more
about alligators and dying and what it would
be like to go that way…a subject for a gator’s meal;
nothing more, nothing less.

Then again, I’m in Worcester, in New England,
and it’s the day after Thanksgiving and damn, it’s cold;
the chance of falling into a gator’s maw is very, very slim.
I sit and think some more about how I’d like to go
five years, ten years from now — oh, it won’t be long,

I know that, and my casual thinking gets black
and serious and downright evil when I let myself
realize it. I’m going to pass sooner, rather than later.
It won’t be via alligator. I know that. Instead
I’ll go with some little fuss in a hospital bed

or with a quiet fall to a polished floor at home.
What will it matter, then? Either way I will
fall and go, slipping off into the ether, and I suspect
it will not matter to me which way I go, as long as
I’m gone. I will slip into a new world,

one nobody really knows; despite mythology,
in denial of old traditions, rejecting orthodoxy,
I will be in it and either it will be blank space
or something else and I will say ooh and ahh
and be amazed or shrug it off and say eh...

but I suspect I’ll still have this ratty old chair, and
I trust I will have my jealous alligators
circling endlessly about, waiting for my hand
to stretch down, an afterthought, a token
of my love for this life that led me here,

that led me to the end of my silly, silly days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T