Whether judged or not, whether meriting or no, though it’s not up to us — if it was, then…PopPop’s dying. Despite lust for Arschstrong, known as luxuria, or gula, greed’s avaritia, the lazy like — and who knows if in reward for the grace that’d been their one week together, him and Benjamin’s — he the shirker, he the enlightened, the weekday modern and Sunday skeptic dies now how he began: within the tradition he’d once forsaken. All’s vanity, pretense, mere role. It’s dramatic, theatrical, geriatric stock staged for the footlit curtains closing up north and Downtown, Second Avenueways, which though in hiding an illustrious street is at heart a vein that, unlimited, exposed, flows south through the island of his native Manhattan then on down the highways of the coast to bind New York’s beginning to Miami’s deadend — the lifeline, the timeline interminable, the intestate Interstate…the aired path of the snowbirds’ perhiemate migration, and the wavelength of the radio and television signals he’s channeling, too, on their frequency their cries, their overwrought shows.
An honorable, traditional death, heldover for reruns — in that it all takes nearly an hour, in one account, while others hold two or ten times that much and more; or else, in some interpretations given over to the mystic lacking a timeslot, he’s still dying and always will be forever, replayed without redemption, eternally, infinitely, heaven or hell. PopPop staggers from bedroom to bath, its chest of pills, tablets engraved with milligrams of saving hope. Dropping them scattered. To steady atop a mountain of rug tripped over then drug, through the hall, its wall and switch he flicks to dim the light appropriate to such serious passage. A shout to the livingroom, a scream to the kitchen to echo tintinnabulatory within the suck of the sink. PopPop beats his breast, this dizzies him, unsupported with this drumrolling beat he falls, flamed across the livingroom, the familyroom, the den, and the backstage, too, of all other rooms besides, their capacity of other dimensions, mystical, mystifying: his drop to the sofa taking another hour itself, with gravity only just awake, waiting its weather patiently out on the balcony.
Want to talk gravity? eulogize death itself! Talk about PopPop’s fall from that couch to the one floor of the rooms that are all themselves only one room stageset and propped whirling around taking twice the hour of his previous fall, how it feels; he rights himself amid a cushion’s cradle, tearing pillows to the floor to better comfort his demise, the mourning impending. How many days dailied and their nights the run, the rushes, not rushed enough. Upsets furniture. Upsets the janitorial staff, working disposal floors banged below. A wild animal it sounds like. Though a sign out front says,
