Five Advantages for Choosing Popsicles over Death: A Poem to Walt Whitman
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
- Walt Whitman, of course
Cherry, kiwi, coffee, and, if you’re lucky,
creamsicle, feather cardboard covers
in a frozen aisle in a Supermarket in
California. Flavors clear and sweet in
Technicolor catalogue. Flavors loafing list-
lessly, like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.
Death has no red tints, no chocolate bits;
it comes in one flavor, really: an absence
of flavor; the place where flavor goes
without leaving a forwarding address.
Sticks are easy to seize in one hand
while licking while you hide behind your
window. While seizing fast to twenty-eight
bathers by the shore- a left hand left
to souse out spray or pull blinds back
to love them even more.
Death does not come impaled on a stick;
you can’t lick while choosing the boy
you like best. There is no joke printed on the
handle, no punch line hidden in the center.
Citrus, syrup, sorbitol- some melon
(though more often mango, as mandated
by the FDA) loaf atop statistics:
Serving Size, Iron, Sugars, and a spot
of Vitamin C. Scientists will never discern
Death’s fat content for certain, an amount
for America’s daily calorie diet. Death
chooses arbitrary numbers; dollar signs
at the cancer ward, Russian roulette in the alley.
Less consistent, less predictable than packages
of fifteen or fifty in the freezer.
You say you found no sweeter fat than that
sticking to long-standing bones- but
confections quiescently frozen have small
attention spans- stay shortly, so sweetly,
make a saccharine scene on your shirt.
Death is a sour houseguest; a Horace
Traubel type. It refuses to leave your gardens
and those rooms full of perfumes-
it squashes each leaf of grass one by one,
it dirties all of your towels.
In the end of it all, Walt, the point is and has been
and will be above and under all possible worlds,
popsicles. After all, if you knocked on Democracy’s
door with Death in your cooler or running down
your chin, the man at the gate might not let you in. -
Yes, in spite of as many multitudes as you are.
- Walt Whitman, of course
Cherry, kiwi, coffee, and, if you’re lucky,
creamsicle, feather cardboard covers
in a frozen aisle in a Supermarket in
California. Flavors clear and sweet in
Technicolor catalogue. Flavors loafing list-
lessly, like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.
Death has no red tints, no chocolate bits;
it comes in one flavor, really: an absence
of flavor; the place where flavor goes
without leaving a forwarding address.
Sticks are easy to seize in one hand
while licking while you hide behind your
window. While seizing fast to twenty-eight
bathers by the shore- a left hand left
to souse out spray or pull blinds back
to love them even more.
Death does not come impaled on a stick;
you can’t lick while choosing the boy
you like best. There is no joke printed on the
handle, no punch line hidden in the center.
Citrus, syrup, sorbitol- some melon
(though more often mango, as mandated
by the FDA) loaf atop statistics:
Serving Size, Iron, Sugars, and a spot
of Vitamin C. Scientists will never discern
Death’s fat content for certain, an amount
for America’s daily calorie diet. Death
chooses arbitrary numbers; dollar signs
at the cancer ward, Russian roulette in the alley.
Less consistent, less predictable than packages
of fifteen or fifty in the freezer.
You say you found no sweeter fat than that
sticking to long-standing bones- but
confections quiescently frozen have small
attention spans- stay shortly, so sweetly,
make a saccharine scene on your shirt.
Death is a sour houseguest; a Horace
Traubel type. It refuses to leave your gardens
and those rooms full of perfumes-
it squashes each leaf of grass one by one,
it dirties all of your towels.
In the end of it all, Walt, the point is and has been
and will be above and under all possible worlds,
popsicles. After all, if you knocked on Democracy’s
door with Death in your cooler or running down
your chin, the man at the gate might not let you in. -
Yes, in spite of as many multitudes as you are.