a case for mortality

I wonder if your flight attendants have New York accents or British ones.
I wonder if your plane is coming or going.
Maybe the flight attendants are neither
from Manhattan or Manchester.
And maybe they change how they speak
depending on their destination.
Welcome aboard, yall! when they head South
or Please turn off your mobiles when they fly to England.

They aren’t real you know.
They aren’t real until you can follow them home
and hear them curse at their dogs for
pissing on the couch again.
They are as real as the angels I prayed
to fly alongside your plane tonight.
Never back. Never forth.
Never just sometimes, but always.
Which is just as good as never.

I don’t know if I ever told you this,
but we think my dog has heartworm.
He hasn't seen a vet since he was a puppy.
He’s basically a wild dog now.
It’s strange he’s become almost saintly
just because I know he’s dying.
Sometimes I see him in the kitchen window
running through the pine trees,
chasing birds and armadillos.
There is a fight in him that is vindicated.
He is real. He’s living,
because he’s going.

In the next two weeks,
visions of you,
spiked tea in porcelain cups,
a busty British woman,
and her plush, red couch
will infiltrate my thoughts.
But that image is so much like your plane, you see,
so much like your flight attendants,
because it isn’t real.
My anxiety knows no beginning.
My conclusion jumping does not come and go.
It has always been.

There was a time when we were not.
Then a time when we were.
And now as we are dying, together, it seems
we are more alive than angels.
We are more precious than an Ibizan sunrise
or a champagne cork in the Mediterranean.
We are out of breath in the thicket of the pine trees,
pumping not just blood but worms, too.
It’s life, can’t you see?
Unless we die, love,
we never really were.
So let us die.