Four Prose Poems from While the Undertaker Sleeps

That Foreshadow Our Troubled Times

Aug 04, 2025

A few days ago, I reread some of my prose poems from my While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. These poems were written shortly after 9/11, expressing all the fear and stupidity of that moment, as we waited nervously for what might come next, and wondered how people casually went about their business with, excuse me, their heads up their asses.

Does all of this sound eerily familiar?

Hopefully, these poems show the range of the prose poem, which lends itself to both comedy and tragedy, often at the same time.

While the Undertaker Sleeps is available in hardcover for $31, paperback for $21 Undertaker1 and on Kindle for only $5 Undertaker 2 I hope you enjoy these poems enough to buy the book and support my loyal publisher Marc Vincenz and his terrific press, MadHat.

“Hawk”

Sometimes I awake with a headline stuck in my head—Doctor in Bangor Treating Elvis for Migraines; Pharmacist Completes History of Drive-In Movie Theater—and I write it all down in my little red notebook. But there are other nights when blood rocks my heart, and people I’ve injured or the dead appear, hovering above the ceiling fan. The city is asleep, the city is awake, the city is napping. Does it matter? I think, climbing insomnia’s creaky stairs to an attic that doesn’t exist, trying to remember what is good, what is right. Yesterday, my student fell from a tree and died. That morning I knelt before the dog’s crate and kissed her goodbye. I stopped to buy cough drops and a backscratcher. I was cut off twice and beeped at once. My student wrote a story about the Civil War, about heroism. He wrote about an uprising of Christmas reindeer, about a boy and his imaginary camel. He drew a cartoon called the “Devolution of Man,” and he once wrote: “Artists have to try, no matter how hard, to love their enemy because it is up to artists to save humanity.” Because he believed in what he wrote, he wasn’t my best writer. He wasn’t a liar; he wasn’t waiting for applause. The clap of crows emptying a tree was enough for him, the simple architecture of an egg. He had climbed, I think, to gain a different perspective, like the hawk that mysteriously appeared today. I was walking to class and sensed its dreadful presence, then heard a squirrel’s lament no more than ten feet away—a bone-crushing sorrow for life, for death.

“Explanation”

What should I tell you? That it rained for five straight days, that the gutters leaked in spite of the duct tape, that a rat ate through the cellar screen and killed the cat? Today, a bus exploded in Israel killing eighteen people, and no one is paying attention. We pour our oatmeal, cover it with bran, with raisins. We rev up our stainless-steel juicers and kiss each other goodbye. “In a brazen daytime ambush yesterday,” I read, then feed the dog, take her for a walk. It’s been one year since the world was silenced by a ringing in my ears, my jaw tightening at the thought of leaving home. Gone was the trail left by any stupid thought. Gone the long conversations with friends on the phone, or killing time with a raisin bagel in a loud coffee shop with absolutely no fear of being blown into another galaxy, one much saner than ours. But I got used to the ringing, just as I get used to the headlines, to the lies and counter lies, barely audible over the bad music of the nightly news, over Sunday sermons as useless as a clock we once buried inside a snowman’s brainless head—its tick, tick, ticking. “As an armor-plated bus lumbered up the winding road to Emmanuel,” I read. “As a powerful bomb exploded, riddling the vehicle with shrapnel….”

“Just Listen”

I sit by the window and watch a great mythological bird go down in flames. In fact, it’s a kite the neighborhood troublemaker has set on fire. Twenty-one and still living at home, deciding when to cut through a screen and chop us into little pieces. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” his mother would say, as they packed our parts into black antiseptic body bags. I explain this possibility to the garbage men. I’m trying to make friends with them, unable to understand why they leave our empty cans in the middle of the driveway, then laugh as they walk away. One says, “Another name for moving air is wind, and shade is just a very large shadow”—perhaps a nice way to make me feel less eclipsed. It’s not working, it’s not working. I’m scared for children yet to be abducted, scared for the pregnant woman raped at knife point on the New Jersey Turnpike, scared for what violence does to one’s life, how it squats inside the hollow heart like a dead cricket. My son and his friends found a dead cricket, coffined it in a plastic Easter egg and buried it in the backyard. It was a kind of time capsule, they explained—a surprise for some future boy archeologist, someone much happier than us, who will live during a time when trees don’t look so depressed, and birds and dogs don’t chatter and growl like the chorus in an undiscovered Greek tragedy.

[And, finally, one more recent and mildly humorous poem from the days of Covid]

“The Lost Day of Creation”

On the eighth day of quarantine, my friend and I sat on the living-room floor petting my pug. All week she’d been giving us the creeps, acting superior, as if taunting us with her doggie immunity. Every time I’d throw something at the wall or start to cry, she’d roll contentedly onto her back, appearing to smile. But then it’s often hard to know with pugs. They’re crafty. Just when you think they’re almost human, they’ll act like real dogs and crap on the rug. “Nothing but endless fields of nothingness in that head,” my sick, drunken friend said. Which made me don my little red shaman hat and yank it over my ears … whereupon, the smell of ancient stories enveloped me, along with the odor of garlic and steamed hyacinths. I was expecting a symbol-rich prelude to a new myth that would do justice to the moment, but the world, as usual, was tongue-tied, as if waiting for me to make the next move …

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

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