Live Fast or Die (Partlow Institution for Mental Defectives, a segregated facility)
Your Imaginary Funeral
Live Fast or Die (Partlow Institution for Mental Defectives, a segregated facility)
This is a perpetual mourning
poem. If you were told to live
fast, you’ll be aghast at life’s stretch,
a thing too long for haiku, since
elegies have length, and heft, or maybe
fool that you are you don’t know
you can’t write your own, and they’ll
kill you if you can’t live fast. They’ll
kill you if you want much, too, if
you want more than gravel to chew,
and they’ll kill you if you want to, but just
can’t. This law of nature, man’s, too,
rewards malignant neglect until
we can forget your forms, your faces
pleading your humanity with sallow eyes.
She’s red in tooth and claw, they’ll say,
as if you’d know between the two laws
which one they meant. We make places like this
for the ones with brains passing too slow
into our fast lane, or veering across lanes
we’ve drawn for polite traffic at a pace
without speed bumps, crosswalks, not for we
who go fearlessly and live fast. If you knew
all this, you know the pressuring presence
of unmarked tombs on the premises. Peace is
easily borne for the slow-footed, slow-witted.
Yet you know nothing, slumbering, clambering
like any child from the womb. But know this:
your mother stored you there like all these
discontented relics and specimen jars you can’t
understand—never could—her dearest suffering, you
child of hers, child of God (Nature’s, too),
prisoner of all social-traffic laws, no one’s parlor
talk. They’ll kill you slow and say you’re
malingering. They’ll kill you, they’ll kill you.
They’ll kill you if you can’t at the least,
once, at last! Just for once, live fast.
Your executor turns away the floral dross
of execrable folk who spurned you.
Your eulogist skewers your nasty boss
who ambushed, burned you without warning.
You direct contributions in your memory
to cross-town rivals in philanthropy.
You stick those bourgeois peace lilies
right in their hypocritical Achilles.
Your dead self toasts from the Antilles.
Another eulogist—for you have legions—
puts the ramparts of some Jesus-crazies
in the very backmost pew, the best places
being reserved for nonhereditary reasons
(such as that they actually somewhat knew you).
At your hypothetical funeral, they say,
it was so nice that FDR died before he retired.
We can remember him signing orders for D-Day,
not playing sponsored rounds of celebrity golf.
Your empaneled dead self scoffs, brushes off
the clay of banal denial, flicks to a mystery TV
channel. We pause for a moment now for those monsters.
Pamela Sumners is a constitutional and civil rights lawyer born and bred in Birmingham, Alabama. Her work has been published or recognized by 30 journals or publishing houses in the US, the UK, and Ireland in 2018 and 2019. She was selected for inclusion in 2018’s 64 Best Poets, and she has been nominated for 2019’s 50 Best Poets. She was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. She now lives in St. Louis with her family, which includes three rescue hounds who think eyeglasses are a food group.
