Poem

JERRY

Jerry lived in a trailer park,
in an eight-wide with cigarette smoke
baked into the walls by hot summers.

He was ex-army and had never
been to war. After he got cancer in his lungs,
he sometimes ate lunch at our house.

Jerry would laugh like everybody else
at a joke somebody had made.
He still smoked, and did not seem sad at all.

But at night he came to our steps, crying.
He did not see darkness as the limitless world
the soul enters at death.
For him it was a void, a swallowing.