The Plague on TV

The kid keeps asking if there are rhetorical questions

in the afterlife, and does the little voice go on chattering

inside the headless? In whose language? Do the gods pray

to each other? What do they ask for? What do they offer

to sacrifice? It’s the 29ᵗʰ of February, a cicada droning

on the sill and a plague on TV and the kid going on and on,

but it feels good to sit here buzzing inside myself watching

TV at the odd end of Florida, February, a cicada moaning

on the sill and a plague on, and the kid going on and on,

so I go on debating with myself whether it’d be better

to die of the plague or to die of anything other than

the plague during a plague, and I begin getting nervous

for the kid and myself as remembered by the kid

riding shotgun in the lead car behind my hearse,

and I begin to wonder how long I’ll miss the view

from inside my own head in any kind of afterlife,

of the other side of my face, of the kid as seen

through my face, of TV and the cicada like a little

winged ambulance bawling on the sill purpled

with dusk, meaning my view of everything, I keep

asking and asking, but the kid’s decamped to his bunk,

the cicada receding into the soft quarantine of night,

and the TV is talking to itself again, and the plague is there

making its gross calculations like a god sizing up a lamb.