REGARDING WHAT COMES NEXT

John Grey

Days are long gone
when I expected to finally see
Jimi Hendrix in concert
in the afterlife
or reunite with family
or be greeted by
that know-all St Peter
regaling me with my sins
while I tried in vain
to speak up for my good points,
and reincarnation
was trendy in my early twenties,
even welcome
as long as I didn’t come back
as a tsetse fly or a Mason,
and there was all this stuff
about attaining a higher plane
which saw me through a month or two
and there were the cheesy seances,
rapping, tapping contacts
from the other side
though I couldn’t see myself,
post-funeral, as a rapper or a tapper,
and my spiritual awakening
got abstract there for a while
like there was a painting
on the wall at MOMA in New York
just waiting for me to be part of it,
followed by the resignation
that it’s all meaningless, purposeless,
that we’re flesh and bone
and nothing more,
food for the soil, the worms
or the fire,
that there may be an eternity
but it doesn’t involve me
or the ones I’d miss
if I was capable of missing
when I’m gone –
in other words,
right now I’m living
and just you try and stop me.