Dead Man's Curve

Dead Man's Curve

“ Live as if you were already dead”

~unsourced “Zen” saying, as quoted by poet Marvin Bell.

“You don’t come back/from Dead Man’s Curve…”

~20^th Century American Pop Song by Jan & Dean

The Dead Man as Poseur

The Dead Man is living as if he’d been alive, because he has it all backwards.

The Dead Man is primarily a pretentious but not harmless twit, prowling the internet, squinting at some tasty wisdom he thinks he can consume like a burrito.

He likes the way the monks' robes swish as they rake the rocks 
in the sand gardens of sleeping neurons deep within an electric foreign tranquility, and thinks he must just totally must, 

have that app.

He’s looking at his navel, and sighing over the Bodhi tree; a plastic green predecorated scotch pine in the window of the home warehouse store.

Of course, there’s no reason he couldn’t sit beneath the tree, but he worries about store security, and really, he just doesn’t have the time, even though he’s supposed to be Dead 
for quite awhile.

His watch hasn’t stopped,it still tocks, so he’s still late. (If you’re pressed for time as a corpse, certainly you have no time to lose.)

But he can’t tell time very well anymore, what with the being so Dead and all.

If his eyelids hadn’t rotted, if his eyeballs weren’t a crow’s canapé, he still would look at everything and see nothing.

More about the Dead Man as Poseur

There is no more, except a Dead Man’s ego that stalks cyberfinity

and hides in the picture of a prettier girl smiling in her prom dress.

There is no more, except the Dead Man’s maw of ever gaping hunger

that dips ink brushed parchment into chocolate, and deep fries a butterfly on a stick under a maraschino cherry tree.

There is no more, except the Dead Man’s fear that the bottomless void

will suck the Dead brains right out of him and spit them into a peanut shell.

There is no more, because someone 
buried the Dead Man alive.

December 2010

Originally written in response to the Monday Prompt of 12/13/10, to write a “Dead Man’s poem” a la Marvin Bell, at Big Tent Poetry. This is explained in more detail here









Disclaimer: I cannot find any source in Zen Buddhist literature  for the saying Mr. Bell has used to create his genre of Dead Man's Poetry. Internet searches on these keywords will return only Mr Bell as a source. While this does not detract in any way from the independent merit of his work, I would take the assumption that it has any real connection to Zen tradition with a grain of salt. It seems more likely to me that this is a corruption of the famous quote attributed to Gandhi: "Live as if you will die tomorrow." But that's just me. 


Image of plastic zombie and flowers: yard art by Toscano, public domain
Second Image: Duncan Quinn suit ad, public domain