"Final Exit" (National Poetry Month Poem-A-Day) Day 20
Written by Bruce A.
Pandolfo
4/20/2017
Are your beloved
keepsakes blurring?
Is memory an old friend
whose name eludes you,
bungee jumping from a
broken neural pathway
unwritten,
unrecognized,
unspoken from your
drying tongue?
Are the integral
characters of your past censored
like a yearbook whose
faces are perforated
with wavering,
obscuring uncertainty
emphasizing the “no”and
“lost” in “nostalgia”?
Is agony colonizing
your withering frame,
crippling you coldly,
rattling your hollowing bones,
gnarling your spine
into a question mark
as if to punctuate “why
are we still here?” ?
Is your pain rendering
you bedridden
and then festering
maliciously in your bedsores?
Are you in an
unthinkable state of thoughtlessness?
Is your dignity digging
a ditch to decrepitude
with your will-to-live
becoming a will-not-live?
Is your self worth
attenuating as you balance precariously
on the tight rope of
your thinning mortal coil?
Fran will be your exit
guide.
She is a midwife of
mortality.
No assistance,
just a soothing
presence
as you smoothly
transition
out of your present
state of “living”
with some ounce of
dignity intact.
Don your morbid hood,
like a falcon making
its last dive
with exhilarating power
and grace
(as opposed to the
wavering
pathetic flight pattern
topography
of your EKG machines'
stale stenographer's
topographical mortal
journalism.)
Spread your wings
like so many grim and
gaudy
grave-stone gargoyles.
Fran will be your exit
guide.
She is not the reaper's
secretary.
She won't hold the exit
door for you,
or push the elevator
button,
but she will be there
to watch you leave.
She will wish you well.
She will accept your
journey.
She may sing with you
from her own frail
crackling
70 year old vocal
cords:
“River Styx and
Headstones may break my bones
but nursing homes may
never hurt me”
She's seen thirty or
more folks
unmoored to never-more
and has never harbored
resentments.
If you wish to
terminate
on your own terms.
Fran will be your exit
guide.
You can don your hood,
if you wish to meet one
who is garbed the same,
with a scythe like a
harelip road sign.
Fran will drive with
you to the exit ramp.
This is where you get
off.
Where out get out.
Get gone.
Get lost.
Belong.
Be loss.
Where you go on if you
wish not to go on.
Fran will be your exit
guide.
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