by Jack Myers

What’ll I do with my body when I’m dead?
The best times I ever had were spent sailing
in place so I vote for being buried.
But I’ve lived such a nomadic life
my children have drifted out like a smoke plume
coast to coast which’d make me hard to visit.
Maybe I should be shoveled from a crematorium
and sleep like a magic genie inside an urn
next to the trophy boasting of one thing I did well.
But wait! How about being scattered from a bridge
spanning this life to the next?  It’d be the perfect symbol
of crossing over and my constant indecision.  I think that,
my dear executor, makes the vote unanimous.

by Jack Myers

In a program called Survivor Man,
the host, after drifting five days at sea,
washes up in paradise: there’s your coral reef,
the blue lagoon, and exotic colored birds
bouncing on palms in the balmy wind.

Later that day, he finds himself
under a pan –frying sun
among humongous cockroaches,
flesh – eating crabs, and fins
scissoring the island as if it were a cutout.

This paradise looks familiar, he thinks:
the woman he gave up everything for;
the career that turned into paperwork;
the crazy family life that left him hoping
for a quiet retirement.

So what is paradise?  The longing to leave?
The leaving itself?  In the end, Survivor Man
tosses a message in a bottle out to sea.
It floats for years, then washes up in a place like this.

by Jack Myers

6 a.m. March.  Snow flurries.
I’m stepping into the Atlantic,
gulping fast, get –ready breaths
so I can swim furiously, numb
and red all over, to get out to my boat.

I practice my Zen training
which says if I utterly give in
to the cold, I won’t feel how cold it is.

At dusk, I see a cloud backlit
so brilliantly it looks black
while the earth’s atmosphere bathes it
in a perfume of pastel sherbet colors.

If my better half were here,
I would take this in without feeling
the need to tell about it
and making it all about myself.

This is the work I have to do, I tell myself.
Go ahead, I say, swim in it.
Force yourself if you have to.

by Jack Myers

During my life on earth, I loved being
showered by the sun’s colored protons
while seagulls screamed and days
dredged back and forth in the sexual smell of fish.

I loved my yellow consciousness
that was a long yes hovering above me
in blissful numbness like a gold ring
promised to a blue afterlife.

Yes, it was the sunlit numbness of being
in the moment that I miss though I’m enjoying
the reverse: it all happening simultaneously,
and me, holding all of it inside me, totally dispersed.