The Afterlife | Poem

The Afterlife Poem Text

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your
teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
They are moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not
reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
You go to the place you always thought you would
go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot up a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding
judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on
the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this
forever,
while the less inventive...
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