I need death money,
burial bucks, 
final costs covered.
When I leave, my wife
won’t have enough
to cover me in dirt.
I don’t even have six friends
to bear my pall
to the hole I can’t afford
in the casket I cannot pay for.

I worry about this now
because when I die
I won’t give a shit.
That’s life and when I’m out of it
you who carry on
shouldn’t have to pay.

Being unable to afford to die
is no joke,
especially to the undertaker
whose receivables pile up
with each shovelful heaped on the mound.
He can’t return me.
This is no Jesus and Lazarus thing.

Now, how do I want to go?
How many hours
will I have to work at, say,
twenty-five per;
then, how many days will
my heart and mind
conspire to give me?
I want to live long enough
to die properly,

to be laid out in a chapel
surrounded by peace lilies
and gladiolus,
while my wife grieves, snorts
into those tiny tissues
the mortician provides
while my brother-in-law admires
the finish on the casket.

Thirty thousand sounds good.
At twenty-five per
that’s twelve-hundred hours.
Ten hours a week makes
one-hundred-twenty weeks,
not even three years
including a vacation
at Cape Cod each summer.
I can do that.
I feel good, like I can last
another productive six or seven.
At that rate I could
line my casket with
chinchilla pelts.

Judy! Call the funeral parlor.
Get a plot in Farmington.
You know, next to my father.
I’m going out in style.
Invite whoever is still alive.
And music, I want to rock the place.
Oh, let Adeline know.
I swear she meant nothing to me.
She was just a friend.

Now, bury me.
                        

I’ve heard that when the undertaker,
in the course of his ministrations
tweaks a nerve, the whole body
twitches as if the electricity
hasn’t been shut off yet,
the body momentarily leaping
back to life the way mourners
imagine it happening right there
in the middle of a prayer.

I heard too that gallons of liquid
must drain before the body
can be filled with the formaldehyde
that makes it look dead and alive.
Shuffling off the mortal coil
is easier said than done.

How does one get used to the trade?
What does the mortician have
to wash off at night before
sitting down to watch the TV news?
Does he wonder if he’ll get
the ten bodies from
the massacre in Buffalo?
Will he sleep better if he does
or doesn’t?
How does he feel about gun control?
Are bullet holes neater
than knife wounds?

I’ve been to a lot of funerals
and never once envied the man
behind the once-alive, now-dead
body lying in its waxen
doesn’t-he-look-good repose.

Mr. Peterson, high school guidance counselor,
never mentioned undertaker
as an undertaking for us,
never said an enbalmer
makes good money,
those coffin salesmen
make top commissions.
Although Eddie Wilson
of the Wilson’s Funeral Home family
dressed well and had a muscle car
the rest of us could only dream of,
no one thought of a career in funerals.

Mr. Peterson never spoke of
the ovens at the crematoria,
the money to be made servicing them;
or the manufacturer of urns,
the suppliers of gases,
or the immunity of the field
to recessions– the truth
about death and taxes.

I do not malign him for the oversight,
his ignoring the usefulness
of the dead to the economy,
or the failure to teach us,
who, on the edge of career decisions,
might have wanted to know of
the handsome living to be made on the dead
once you get the knack.