Today's poem is by Stephen Kampa

Variations on Justice's Variations on a Text by Vallejo (with a Little Stephen Crane)
       

I will die in a fast food restaurant, surrounded
                by pickle chips and ketchup packets,
the last earthly words I'll ever hear delivered
                by a panicked and polo-shirted
cashier shaking me with minimum-wage vigor
                and repeating, "Sir! Sir! Would you like
fries with that? Would you like fries with that?", unshriven
                of my decades of unrepentant
indulgence in bacon cheeseburgers and double
                quarter pounders with cheese and fried cheese
and tofu—just kidding! cheese! plus hot wings and beer! —
                because in a universe of near
infinite complexity, unpredictable
                variables, India pale ales
and kale, we pretty much end up choosing the world
                we want, and in mine, kale will kill you
faster than truckloads of bratwurst, although I know
                in some persuasive unfun versions
what I've chosen will kill me, all of it having
                bypassed my guts and gone directly
to my heart, where it will have reconstituted
                itself exactly in a double-
quarter-pounder-with-cheese shape, so when the crusty
                coroner performs my autopsy,
he will holler, "Good God, Tweaksberry, this man's heart
                looks like a burger!" since our choices
form our habits, which form our characters, which form
                our destinies, at which point his young
apprentice or towel boy or dismemberment
                engineer whose name is really Jones
will ask, "Is it still warm?" since he had to skip lunch,
                and I, Stephen Kampa, hereby in
these lines—and perhaps in that future in a last
                postmortem spasm, in a final
neurological fizzle and wisp—will bellow,
                "Eat it!", being no longer partial
to my poor belarded heart, ever the center
                of me, ever the disappointment,
the upshot of my lifelong downslide, the outcome
                of my insolence, this fat nuisance
that I fed and fed on all the livelong day while
                God—in kindness, maybe—glanced away.

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Copyright © 2024 Stephen Kampa All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission