Poetry

AFP photo

By

Gary Glauber

Recipe for Disaster

Other people who seem to have it all

discussing others who mystifyingly

took the plunge, descending fast,

riding headline to headline,

rollercoaster off the rails

prompting unsavory discussion

of how such sad feats are managed,

strength of scarf or necktie,

desperation of doorknob’s

primitive methodology.

When one closes,

another opens,

then silence.

None of this pettiness is pretty.

Still the public clamors for details,

hoping to understand,

playing amateur detective,

seeking to piece together solutions.

It invokes Edwin Arlington Robinson’s

call to recognize how the disease

spares no one.  In the end,

status and wealth offer no immunity

from the terrible skewers

of skewed thinking

that impale contentment

in its violent wake.

You will never fully understand.

And so you get the aftermath

of shared misery and memory,

of hate and jealousy and contempt,

of praise and anecdotal evidence.

Life is a contradiction, it tells you

in extended apology, so as not to negate

all that has gone before.

Soon shock turns sullen and

more somber yet,

as legacy belies facts,

fermenting like smashed grapes

in giant cask, sweet turning sour

through measurable chemical process.

But not all formulae turn out as planned.

Real life is not your control group.

and you grasp to comprehend found results.

This cannot be.

This break with the universe hurts.

Every smile seems feigned,

every mirror lies.

And as you return

to workaday rigors,

fed numbing platitudes

of feeble assurance,

you fill slowly with

sad acceptance,

wondering whose unexpected silence

inexplicably comes next.

Gary Glauber

Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. His works have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. He champions the underdog to the melodic rhythms of obscure power pop. His collection, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) is available through Amazon, as is a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press). His newest collection, Worth the Candle, is now out from Five Oaks Press.