Last Will

Granny, you had a great big house for decades,
then an apartment for a few years, a single room
at the home for a couple of months, now a coffin
indefinitely: smallest residence, longest lease.
You died of cancer but I blame the mortician
who wants to kill us all with inch-thick make-up.
Funerals are crap, burial is a waste of real estate.
When I come to this somebody burn me but
make sure I’m dead before you sell my books.
Put my last drafts in a random volume
then give my library away to anyone who knows
what a book is. I moved about all my life
but I lived well in books; so scatter them as my true
and long-lived if not entirely eternal form.

*

I was reading Stuart Dischell's poetry today, off and on while grading; but there's more of Alan Dugan in the above, at least from line five on. I can't possibly attain as stoical/skeptical/jaded or Brooklynesque a voice as Dugan, but I can try.

This poem hijacks a memory of my grandmother's funeral many years ago (well, one of my grannies -- I had three). I was remembering how disturbing her visage was, there in the casket; as if she had been hijacked. 

But if the poem is elegiac, it's noting the loss of books, not grandmothers; a premature mourning, sure, but one worth worrying about in our digital age (he said, on his digital blog site).