"Le Voyage Dans la Lune" is a film by Georges Méliés / 1902

                 original poem by: "The Consortium D'Quequechan." 

                 (my younger brother said: "It looks like a rocket ship!")

                   Requiem:

Our father died and

with our mother and older sister distraught and unable,

I drove west on Bedford with my younger brother aside

to make arrangements at the funeral home––

the one used to bury

my father’s parents

the same one used to bury

my mother’s parents and

just about every dead

relative in the city.

So we entered the funeral home

to pick a casket from three available,––

each ready to serve a worthy occupant.

The first was a bronze color and too flashy,

the second was brownish and too earthy,

but the third was silver-toned,

smeared in a heavily glazed lacquer.

My little brother said it looked like a rocket ship. It looked

like the one Flash Gordon would fly on his way to Stardom.

That was it. That's the one. The one that’ll rocket the oldman

beyond the stacks and steeples of a hard, working-class landscape,

beyond the summer sweltering saloons of "Buzzard's Bay"

their proprietors eager to shell-out for the oldman's wares,––

upward, far beyond the gloomy precinct of priests, and far,

far beyond the craggy Man-in-the-Moon with a lesser rocket run through his eye!–– 

Well, these are the things I would have liked to tell my sister and my mother

in order to assuage their grief, leaving them free to tidy-up, to set out platters

of Marcucci's cold cuts, and Marzilli's pizza for the hordes of well-wishers

pulling up to the curb in their Oldsmobiles and Studebakers and Pontiacs and..

and.. Wait a minute! What the hell is that?–– 

Who the christ do we know owns a freakin' Henry J. Kaiser?!

Requiem