Death.

Where is death?
Have you ever seen it?
I mean, looked right at it?
It is still here.
It surrounds us and intrudes every once in awhile.

No matter how many theme park cemeteries we build,
or how many three minute videos on MTV you watch,
no matter how deep the hospital basements,
no matter how fast it is picked up off the street by quickly moving red and white vans,
no matter how much money you put into your mutual funds.

It’s the rotweiler on the freeway that has fallen out of the back of a speed freak’s flatbed truck late at night.
By early morning his carcass has been smashed and pummeled by every truck, car, motorcycle, and semi-trailer combo on the 3 lane of the 405 South.

His name was Guts.

It’s the two week old corpse of a grandmother alcoholic, not so silently,
expanding and stiffening in a small back house.
Heat wave summer and a busted air conditioner mean that the flies are big and crowd on the inside of the windscreens.

When the police come with the landlord and break the door down,
the smell is a physical force that pushes them all back and makes the younger one gag reflexively.

The smell will never come completely out of his uniform,
no matter how many times he has it dry cleaned,
lightly starched
and pressed.

It’s the tight firing pattern of a .22 semi-auto rifle.
The rabbit has been shot many, many times.
Fur and child-like screeching float on the air.
She tries to scramble into the bush but, can’t.
The hunter runs up and crushes its head under his waffle-stompers.
The light going out of her eyes as the head slowly floats to the floor.

It is in the old man’s lungs slowly filling with blood underneath a black moonless sky.
The paper bag spills oranges on the rain-slicked road slowly mixing with the oil dropped from traffic-jam cars.
The good Samaritan that stops to administer pointless CPR will find bloody knees are his.

The eternal questions being asked (on the freeway, in a back house, in the brush, in front of the mirror and other places):
Did you love well?
Did you contribute?
Did you make a difference in someone’s life?
Did you find out the answers to all of your questions and doubts?
Did you get everything that you really, really wanted?