Ladies, life is no dream; Gentlemen, 
it’s a brief folly: you wouldn’t know 
death’s flashcard if you saw it. 
First the factories close, then the mills, 
then all the sooty towns shrivel up 
and fall off from the navel. 
And how should I know, just because my gramma 
died in one? I was four hundred miles away, 
shopping. I bought a pair of black breasts 
with elastic straps that slip over the shoulder. 
I’m always afraid I might die at any moment. 
That night I heard a man in a movie say 
I have no memories and presumably he meant it. 
But surely it was an act. I remember my gramma’s 
housedress was covered with roses. And she 
remembered it too. How many times she turned 
to her lap and saw the machines: the deep folds 
of red shirts endlessly unfolding while they dried. 
Whose flashcard is that? So, ladies and gentlemen, 
the truth distorts the truth and we are in it up 
to our eyebrows. I stand here before you tonight, 
old and wise: cured of vain dreams, debauched, 
wayward, and haggard. The mind’s a killjoy, if 
I may say so myself, and the sun’s a star, 
the red dwarf of which will finally consume us.