dear poet, please consider these peanuts

why are all of your poems about death?
even your poems about sex
are about death.
and so are your poems of longing
and the universe and youth. Death
follows your verse like pigpen’s dust cloud.
you carry death around like linus’s wubby.
you pounce on it’s keys like Schroeder’s piano.
poems about bright red yo-yo’s that go up
and down on a snowy white string
evade you like the football that Lucy pulls away
from Charlie Brown in the last second.
i can see death has even gotten into this poem.
he is in the room with me now, picking at his
tooth with a long bony finger.
he’s saying something to me now,
but I can’t understand him
through his warbly & distorted adult voice.

*
From Mule And Horse.