Poem: Glass Coffins

Glass Coffins

This kind of thing used to be civilized;
you'd kill someone, and they'd be dead
but like everything these days, there's all the paperwork,
forms and witnesses, documents to be faxed
before we can give death the go ahead.
Give me half a dozen meetings
as meetings go around here, and it'll be restricted
to Mondays through Fridays, business hours;
death will take twelve holidays off a year.

I remember when it was black and white,
when you were living or dead, and the in between
belonged to Michael Jackson music videos
and occulteers in dark alleys, when
there was no controversy; if you had a knife in your head
or the cough of consumption, we dragged in the box;
not this ridiculous business, shining lights at pupils,
an octopus sprouting from a dead man's mouth,
the hundred thousand dollar ambiguity.

They're like glass coffins, these rooms;
the white coats round and gawk and pat themselves
on the back since this is the closest they've gotten
to resurrection itself. I almost succeeded in rolling
a three day boulder in front of a room
before the nutritionist stopped me, said
"You can't do that, we need to give him tube feeds."

He never came back, this gentleman;
we didn't think he was Jesus anyway,
with more blood than brain in his head.
After a week of gumshoe-ing
we found a brother who wouldn't come in
but still we scheduled a time, 1600.
Even medical futility needed a schedule,
and though he aspirated at 1400,
a blooming pneumonia, an old man's friend,
we continued full steam for two hours
until morphine came waving down the caboose.