"Never Drive a Car When You're Dead"

"It was the anonymity of the stories and the poems that went deepest into me. And the curl of a rhyme was something new."

"Tout le Gout,"
Something new
On the side of a Coke Zero can
For the anglophone American,

Mind of mush, chalk bones, heart half schmaltz, half cynic,
Driving himself down to the local clinic,
Bearing another old wound that won't heal,
Another green serpent stuck to his heel.

The clinic takes cash from the foreigner
And sits him down next to a coroner,
Retired, who says he speculates in gold
To pass the time now that he's grown too old

And ailing
For sailing.

A poet friend
Sits at the end

Of the row of chairs, spots him,
And comes to sit next to him.
She grins at him and bends her head, pert and lean.
"Are you in communion with your machine?"

She asks conspiratorially, as he pecks
With one finger at his phone, and thereby wrecks

His latest foolhardy attempt at rhyme.
He smiles, weakly. "Never rhyme time with rhyme,"
He jokes, but it's too late
In the day to play straight,

And he wonders why he tries so hard
To stay cheerful in the charnel yard.
All that gusto, what a waste
When zero cans all the taste.