M. A. Istvan Jr.
Home Death
As much as in this day women require
epidurals for birthing, the dying require
envelopment by pop culture. Pop TV,
for instance, provides programming
through which the dying commune
with the crowd, losing themselves
and thus their fear. The dying hear
the global vocabulary that binds us
all together in an ancient womb:
Nissan Sentra, Crest, Coca-Cola.
To deny the dying of such comforts
is to deny them, in effect, of home.
Dying, one needs home most of all.
1803-1882
Nature, you say always the same thing.
The sameness is not because your shapes,
ever-new, are merely illusions.
The sameness is not just that your shapes
were already there—pre-inscribed,
encrypted—in your earlier states.
If it is true that whoever walks in you
hears the same thing, that thing
likely has to do with sameness and change
in general (or something else very general).
For with such riches enfolded in you
folding out of you, and with such diversity
of the whoevers in question, there must be
so much diversity in what is heard.
But again, you say always the same thing.
