StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XII, No. XIV

I would like to thank all the troops,
Families are the heart of America,
God is in his heaven,
The poor are always with us,
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
Of the people, by the people, for the people,
Four score ten and Tyler too,
I like Ike, Nixon's the one,
Yes we can, yes we can, yes we can:
A rose in the hand is worth two on a bush,
A wooden nickel gathers no tarnish,
A tisket, a tasket, two if by sea,
If I die before I wake,
Momma, Momma, bang the drum slowly,
For all is right that ends well.

When death at last assassins me
And this sweet tongue lies limply
Behind my pallid slack lips,
What shall they say
When they hear my words
On some distant blue planet
Around a steady Class G,
The voice of an ancient earth woman
Struck full with starstuff?

I need to be within her ordered space,
Feel her strength comfort me,
Banish my demons;  I need her understanding
When my brain grows nine-tenths incoherent,
Keeping me afloat until she orders me again.

I am not an easy wife,
A moderately high maintenance poet
Who hardscrabbles her way through life,
A genius for near genius, classically trained,
With flashes of glib immortality. 

If I had played my cards right,
I could have been a martyr before I was twenty,
Dead from AIDS, a revolution gone awry,
Or some gallant surgeon's less than gallant knife.

Alas, I did not die and have since
Bestowed three children upon the world
And cast perhaps ten thousand poems
Of varying degrees of quality,
On the curious and the unsuspecting.

What would you have me do?
Dead, I am no use to anyone,
But alive, alive I can be
A world class annoyance to everyone.