M. A. Schaffner

laughing at death, playing at death, dying

slowly and courageously like in movies.
 
 

Death as a costume party with vampires;

unlife as a zombie jonesing for brains,

crashing funerals, pretending to care.

 
 
Death as a product sells better firearms,

more lurid fantasies with the heroes

shaped by algorithms to buyers’ needs.
 
 

For needs read desires; for death, denial

in its most comic form. There will be sex,

of course, and thin pale girls with sincere teeth,
 
 

and over the far horizon the real deal

waits confident as a dealer whose marks

within homes and shopping centers basking

in the artificial light and the sounds

we now spend half our lives in programming.
 
 
Call it a form of worship in which faith

awaits succeeding images on screens

displaying visions of a promised land presumed

to lie beyond the imagined lottery.
 
 
Except we know we deserve the numbers

by right of having dreamed them — like Heaven

for the true believer, who also sins

if only just to prove he doesn’t always.
 
 
Inside the car no natural sounds impose

but signs remind us the images are real,

though not always as compelling as the game