Will There Be Cake? Poem by Robert Rorabeck

On the day I die
Will there be time to eat cake,
Or will everyone be too busy trying
To put me back together on the table
Of my broken shell,
And will I hear the new languages of
Insects buzzing all around me in
Their greedy way,
Waiting to craw into my leaking orifices,
Like the skin of putrid fruit
Burst from wrong gases above my eyes
And along my collar bones? Or
Will I be the only one to turn with
The boring nock on the door,
The inevitable salesman of returnable goods,
The reaper of useless necessities coming
To collect his recall,
And then to jot down my soul into a little
Notebook of names and times he keeps in a pocket protector
Of his polyester work shirt?
Will that be all then, the processions of
Common grief, the sermon unasked for,
And thus the nearly anonymous burial down
The rows from my aunt and grandmother,
An epitaph on stone that cost a grand
But says nothing of who I might have been,
And then, thankfully, the top secret corruption
And ruination from greasy head to grimy toe?
Some plastic flowers,
Some days of rain and more of sun, some of
Snow, but none of it experienced or toiled through,
My dreams left unrealized, as her pulse
Beats onward clasped in another’s hand;
But what must be answered before all this hubbub,
And the howling of my lonely dogs through the
Friendless nights in the basest amounts of pain
More smelt than suffered;
Is, will there be cake?