I’m so tired of COVID-inspired TV commercials,
people dancing in front of cameras
doing stupid tricks
with golf balls and plastic cups
trying to pretend they are having fun.

Tonight,
I want to hear your music,
violin lightning and brass thunder
tonality reaching through the mesosphere. 

Creativity
was your one redeeming quality,
you debt-accumulating
philandering
anti-Semite.
I’m almost ashamed to love your music.
Almost.

Yours was a new kind of sound,
uninhibited and unconfined,
traditionalists hated it
families broke up over it.
Today, we’d call those people stupid.
The future will say the same about us
transfixed by ideology
tearing at each other 
while the powerful look on.

It’s almost 4:00 a.m.
and my laptop will soon call me to work.
I already hear its tentacles 
sliding along the office rug.
Siegfried, come down from Valhalla,
purge me of images
of Clorox canisters,
smiling people wiping down surfaces
as if to show some lemon-scented bleach
can save us from Gotterdammerung.
                        

I could have lived in your day
dear Ludwig
before the rape of the bankers
before industrial defilement 
before war could destroy a city
with the touch of a red button.

There was promise
in the shattering 
of the gilded aristocracy,
the melting of kings.
That’s reversing rapidly now.
There are new kings, new nobles, a new downtrodden
but no new revolution.
Your music reminds me
how far we could have gone.

I live in a country that doesn’t care much.
I live in a world that cares even less,
still healthy but aging
still working but increasingly obsolete,
watching  the Virus throw out thousands every day.
I’m old enough to wonder if my turn is coming.

My father walks a dirt road
to the three-note motif of the Moonlight Sonata.
His fingertips disintegrate,
his gait becomes more labored.
My owns joints begin to hurt
and my vision blurs
as I follow a short distance behind.

He’ll be dust soon
from this Virus or from age.
I’ll follow him later,
perhaps from the next plague
but I hope you’ll be there for me
playing your symphonies
while I’m sucking on that plastic tube.
Ode to Joy may be the last joy
of an old man waiting to die.
                        

Alone for the first time in months,
I sink into the strings
of an adagio,
the final movement
of Mahler’s Ninth.

I listen to this piece 
on solemn occasions:
the loss of girlfriends I have loved,
the death of my mother.
It grieves for me, 
expresses what I cannot,
even when I’m by myself.

How did he feel 
as the subject of a dying empire,
witnessing a way of life ready to end?
I am beginning to understand.
He died three years before the Great War,
never read of poison gas or barbed wire
never lived to see Austria crumble
never saw the bread lines
of the Great Depression
the rise of fascism 
the murder of his family and friends.
Maybe he was lucky.

The violins wail 
and I think of my country, 
hundreds of thousands dead
economic collapse
leaders inept or insane.
I am almost glad 
those I lost years before
cannot see what we have become.

The coda lingers:
the last complete thoughts
of a dying man who didn’t want to die.
Resignation fades to silence
the old CD stops spinning
stairs creak from footsteps.
My wife is back from her walk.
I hide my red eyes
in feigned sleep.