In Lieu of Flowers

This morning, after waking up unreasonably early, I decided to work on my upcoming book of poetry. I’m at that fortunate and simultaneously frustrating stage, where I have too much material, and in addition to deciding what to leave out, I’m also struggling with how to organize and sequence things.

Anyway, as a lifetime procrastinator, I turned to one of my tried and tested ways of wasting time, by reading my FB feed. On there, I was taken by an Internet meme that has been shared by my daughter-in-law, which purports to be an obituary written by an AI program. Much like the Kurt Vonnegut commencement speech that wasn’t (it was really a column written by Mary Schmich for the Chicago Tribune, which someone else later posted online, passing it off as it being the work of the late and great writer), this appears to be a fake. However, like that commencement speech that wasn’t, it had some wonderful lines, that just seemed to be begging to be both heard and shared. “An avid collector of dust”, anyone?

As I read it, I decided to play around with the first sentence, where it talks about how Brenda Tent had “retired “from living at the age of old”. That got me thinking, which got me writing, and here is the result.

In Lieu of Flowers

let death be reframed
as retiring from living
some of us
take early retirement
while others dig in
and press on
afterlife beliefs
our personal pensions

seeking life/death balance
dodging downsizing
resisting rightsizing
our final request
on being shown the exit
in lieu of flowers
send more life