Obituary for the
middle class
This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener
beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter
beside a river going to college, you get up
and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins
and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice
till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake
and have a long talk with your breath
and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling
the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this
life
a hundred years from now to children before sleep
who will call them liars, “Once upon a time,
they had two and half bathrooms and tiny houses
for their cars and doctors who listened
through tubes to their fat hearts, they named
their endeavors and beliefs four-wheel drive,
twenty-percent-off
sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,
variable-rate loan,
inheritance,” and we will be
as gods to them in that they won’t believe in us,
and we will be spared the eternity of their worship
as they will be spared money, the counting
and the having and the memory of the middle share
of what gets harder and harder to call a pie
~ from Elegy Owed by Bob Hicok
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