Thirty One Years Ago - Michael Charles Smith 1960 - 1995

The ending of GAYBOY, a novella.

Two weeks into Michael's death vigil at the hospice South of Boston, Patrick, my other younger brother called me into the guest room.

“He’s going.”

The two of us hurried back to his room.

Everyone was crying.

I joined them, and then checked the machines attached to Michael. The vital signs were unchanged. Joni Mitchell’s URGE FOR GOING played on the small tape player next to the bed.

“No sad songs.” I tore out the cassette.

After everyone went home, my younger brother brought his guitar into the room and played FREEBIRD.

“Michael hates that song.”

“I know.” Patrick sniffed through misty eyes. “But your hearing is the last thing to go, so I know if he can hear it, he’ll think of me.”

The nurse approached us out of the earshot of the attending doctors.

“Funny, our patients never leave if a family member is in the room. The hospital encourages your being with him, because the longer you’re with him the bigger the bill.”

I related this information to my father and he summoned the rest of the family. They came over within the hour. It was time to say good-bye.

We each briefly spoke to Michael. His face showed no sign of life. My mother hugged him for a long time and my father pulled her into the corridor. The doctors looked at us with suspicion that we knew what they knew. Within the hour Michael passed over to the angels.

Two days later my sisters and brothers eulogized him at the funeral. My grief prevented my saying a word.

“I’ll always be there for you.”

“I know.”

Bruce my friend from the 1270, a gay disco near Fenway Park, came to the funeral home.

“Sometimes I feel like the last whale in the ocean.” He had lost his lover the year before.

“No matter where I am I’ll hear your call.”

“Thanks for lying.” He could still smile after all this, which meant I could too one day.

I informed my parents about my trip to Asia.

“I’m going to the holiest places on earth to aid Michael’s soul passage from this world to eternity.

And I ended up in Tibet to circle the Jokhang Temple with Buddhist pilgrims spinning the prater wheels. Lhasa salved my soul and Michael remains with me always.

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Much more to come.

Happy Yulemas 2022

Three years on Yulemas the transplant team of Cornell Weill unexpectedly called to inform me that there was a liver waiting for me at the hospital. Near death from impending liver failure I was overwhelmed by this turn of events. A miracle. A Yulemas miracle. I phoned my lifeguard Francis for a ride and then called my sister. Gina was silent for a few seconds, then said, "I was looking through my desk and a Christmas greeting sticker fell out. From a long time ago."

She read me the message.

Peter Merry Christmas Santa Claus.

It was in my mother's handwriting. My mother had passed from this mortal coil in 1997 and I cried realizing Angleine Nolan Smith's grasp on eternity.

We are always us.

MY mother and me outside 8 McKinly Road Falmouth Foresides Maine - 1953

Lazarus II -2022

LAZARUS II

Two summers ago
In the black night of Brooklyn
I
A sixty-nine year old man spewed blood
Into the bathroom tub, a lot of blood__
After wiping the retch
From my face
More spew, more blood, liters of blood red red red
Something not right
Something very wrong
And I went back to sleep
Planning to go to a hospital
If I make the morn__
At dawn
I crossed the East River
Not in an amubulance
In a taxi
To a 1st Avenue hospital
Inside the emergency room
The staff take one look
A scrum of nurses, orderlies, and doctors speed my body from ER to OR
Hands strip my old body naked
“Sir, can you hear me?
A young intern
Nod
“You are bleeding to death from the varices.”
“Varices?”
“Small stomach fissures."
A nod
"Do you have family in New York?”
Head shake from side to side
“Do you want to be revived?”
“From the dead?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”___
An oxygen mask
Over my mouth and nose
“If you have any prayers, say them.”
“Síoraíocht.”
The Celtic word for eternity
No meaning to Christians
Their only afterlifes
Heaven hell or purgatory__
None of that now
The hiss of oxygen, anesthesia
Propofol
Me
Into a Limbo
White light
Nothing, only white
There was something else___
Eternal nothingness
Síoraíocht times zero equals zero
Death
Eternity
I was cool with nothing__
And then I was back
Life
The waking eternity
Here
Pain
The Here not my own bed__
Their hospital
The pain mine.
None of this a dream
Sucked air
The other patient in the room
Not breathing
Never again
Lost to eternity___
Me
Hospital
Nurses
Doctors
An earnest doctor reading a chart
“You were very lucky. We stopped the bleeding.”
“I like luck.”
Ahd in Gaelic
“I have bad news.”
Plenty of bad news__
Cancer
Cirrhosis
The looming threat of death
My forever death's eternity__
I 69
Alone in a hospital bed
In a city of millions
Bad news
It was all right
I had had a grand life__
And I was not dead yet
Still alive
Straddling eternity and nothing
No fear for the past, present or future or nothing__
I had died before
Car crashes
Beatings
Broken hearts
Whatever didn’t kill me
Made me wish I was__
In the following weeks my friends thought this was the end
Some saw death in my eyes
My children in Thailand prayed to Buddha My wives too
That I will live forever
People believed in life eternal
In Heaven, Limbo,or Hell
I had believed the same
As a child
Not now
But I had had a good life___
New England, New York, California, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, Quebec, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Nepal, Tibet, Kenya, Tanzania, and Belize, Guatamala, Honduras, Peru, Jamaica
How can I forget India, the Ganges at dawn?
The burning bodies with a sitarb raga drifting on the smoke from a ghat temple
Friends by the thousands
Two family in Thailand
Five children
Two grandchildren
A good life__
But I was not dead
Still alive
Straddling eternity
Why fight for life?
Why not accept this fate?
Acceptance
Surrender
Freedom__ Morphine made surrender easy
Free
Never to drink again__
And there was still more to come___
Months passed
A year and more
Pain, jaundice, weight loss
Down to 142 pounds
People thought
I looked like a Rolling Stone
Keith Richards___
Ahead my last days
Fly to Thailand
Watch the sun set
Over the emerald green rice fields
My family by my side
Loaded on morphine__
Then a miracle__
Yulemas
An available transplant.
That night back in the OR
The room cuts to black
Clear light
I know this Limbo well
No gods, no heaven, no hell
Nowhere
Nothing
No one
The embrace of eternity Escape from the white light
A detour
To London
The Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse
My body on a chopping block
Entrails scattered across the wood
Then snap back to life This life__
Sniff the air
Antiseptic smell
The gore of the abattoir gone
Clean sheets
The machines beep
A nurse gave me water
Tasting of life
My fingers touch
A black scar
Marking the execution of the old me.
A new me alive
Alive with another soul within me
Paula My donor
Forty years old
300 pounds
A suicide
I love her and she me
Old School Lazarus II
Where’s the morphine?__

From the white propofol extinction
Back from the Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse Back to the eternity__

The new me
In a hospital bed
High over the East River
Not alone
Just Paula and Lazarus II
Wicked scars
Never dead before my time
Only dead to the time before now
Now a gray winter sky o’er Brooklyn
Time eternal
Because there is no time in nothingness
Only Nothing Paula and Lazarus II__
We are not lonely together
Living forever again
Remember from whence thee came and where we’re going
Ashes to Ashes not___

poetry lives with me. this poem has gone through many metamorphosis. Every time I read or recite it, the poem spawns newness with the previously unseen. Always alive like me and Paula and eternity and Síoraíocht__

DEATH IS NOT THE END,

Having died several times over my life I've always been surprised to be reincarnated into the same existence as before my demise. Never younger. Never older. Never another body. Shocked that I survived death to rejoin this life and damned pleased as well. - Lazurus II

To hear Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Shane MacGowan, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey - DEATH IS NOT THE END go to this URL