Poetry Kills

I just finished reading The Caged Owl, which is a collection of poems by Gregory Orr. Reading poetry is something that I've only recently gotten into. I think I don't have the attention span for prose right now. Anyway, there's this poem, "Everything," It goes like so:

Is this all life is then--

only the shallow breaths

I watch you struggle for?

That gasp right now--

if it was water

it would be such a small glass.

And I could lift your head

from the hospital pillow

and help you sip it

to comfort your parched

throat

into the ease of sleep.

Your agony makes no

sense when air

is everywhere, filling

this room where you lie

dying, where we move

as if in a trance, as if

everything is under water.

So anyway, this poem got me thinking about my grandfather. Not a huge leap since, once a person gets to the gasping for air portion of the living/dying process, the experience really sort of becomes universal. I was looking on my old blog for posts around the time my grandfather died. I remembered posting the eulogy that I wrote for him, and I wanted to give it a gander. I remember getting a couple laughs and a few tears, and I wanted to look back over my own brilliance. I went to October 10, 2006 and remembered that I pulled the eulogy after only a few days, because keeping it posted seemed lame or disrespectful or something. Instead what was there was the post the I put up just a few minutes after he died. I'll include it here. Why not?

Then Came the Dry Humping

Grandpa died last night, which sucks the proverbial ass.
Here are some funny things about the situation.
There's this nursing home on the way to Hospice in Dayton. I forget the last names of the families running it, but the initials are S and M. On the awning outside the entrance is written, "S&M". I'm picturing leather and latex clad funeral directors whipping the shit out of those dirty, naughty corpses.
There was this group of folks parading around the circular corridors of Hospice last night singing gospel music. The organ music was prerecorded, and it was rather creepy sounding. Very Count Chocula. One of the songs they sang went something like this, "King Jesus is a listenin' for the sinners to pray." That feels perhaps more suitable for a prison than a Hospice, but maybe they had a limited number of prerecorded numbers on their little ChristCasio 5000.
At one point last night, the aids came in to change my grandpa's bedding and his diaper (obviously this was before he died). I averted my eyes, not because I was embarrassed or ashamed, but because my first concrete memory of my grandfather is of his penis and I was very aware that I didn't want that to be my last memory as well. Not quite the book end of 25 great years of memories I'm interested in.