Poem: Free Spirit

For my grandma, Carolyn Wyse (R.I.P)


My most meaningful memory of my grandma

was the way she mused upon the afterlife

on a road trip shared between the two of us.

 

Driving under the night sky,

she wondered whether consciousness could 

defy decay 

and whether we could still think 

when we became stardust,

strewn into space again,

born into billions of new bodies.


We always had the best conversations.


When grandma was still full of life,

she spent thirty years of retirement

wandering the country in her RV, mostly solo,

never staying in the same spot 

for more than a week or two at a time. 

She lived 

in the perpetual state of re-routing.  

She was nearly omnipresent.


She would hoard and compile comprehensively.

Mostly brochures, books, 

magazines, and news articles.

She would hand them off 

to the people she loved most

because she knew the value of information.

She was the internet born in 1923.

She was virtually omniscient.


And everybody gravitated towards her.

Her energy could light up any space. 

She made so many people realize their power.  

In this way, 

she was mighty close to omnipotence.


But she is human notwithstanding,

and today

she is ready to die.


At the nursing home, 

there are long pull-string alarms 

dangling from the walls 

almost everywhere you can think of.

They hang there, dejected, 

like flaccid, faulty ripcords

meant to prolong the descent

of elders into indignity.


When the family finds her room,

she is entrenched in her bed,

shaking like an autumn tree

before the scattering.

The nurses have her eating ice chips

as if the solution to old age 

is to turn her whole body 

into an organ cooler.


We can not enter her room 

until we cover our sorrow 

with stopgap hazmat suits —

Disguises that strip the humanity 

from our last moments together.

She tells me I am handsome 

even with a mask on.

I am not certain which one she is talking about.

I assume she means the the optimistic one

and not the blue N95 concealing my voice.


Our precautions make a mockery of her.

She was hoping we would be good hosts

and usher death through the door.


Because her next statement made me cringe.

With the candor of Kevorkian she said,

I wish there was a better way to do this. 

As if sighing a solicitation of mercy killing.


I don't have the fortitude to appease her adieu.

I can only euthanize her 

with pretty, premature poetry 

she will never live to read.

So, instead, 

we choose to deflect the statement.


And at this point, 

my father tries to lighten the mood 

as he plays with a stethoscope and says:

Either this thing is broken, or I don't have a heart. 


But why he held it to his chest I do not know,

because everybody's heart is in their throat

choking back their tears, 

trying to rally the right words 

to make up for lost time.


There is no brochure for where she is going next.

The faculty here has bound her with red tape.

They have deemed her too fragile for freedom

and will not allow her the decency 

of a deathbed sprawled in the sun.

She will end in morphine overdose 

and the subsequent stripping of oxygen 

from the coma.


But I have no doubt 

that when she exhaled her final draft of air, 

god pulled his green thumb 

from the mouth of that Utah town

to hitchhike 

upon the momentum of her life force.

It drove past the sunset

and scintillated a vigil of stars

like each was a neuron firing information

around the great beyond.


When the wild blue yonder glitters,

I like to believe 

the divine is dubiously brainstorming 

her replacement.

I still smile when I look up to her

because even when I can not see it,

I know the void never stops shimmering.


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POETRY COLLECTION REVIEW: “BLACK APERTURE” BY MATT RASMUSSEN

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Introduction - How I got into Writing