20150717 (bucket lists)

Sam Walton, American business exemplar, b. 1918 d. 1992

Done everything on your bucket list

Feeling unsatisfied like you should

Have made it longer included

The bungee-jump into the gorge

Except that you learned they can fail

Just enough to let you smash your head 

Moving five miles an hour into the rocks

Then spring back up your cranium spraying

Bones grey matter and blood 

The whole way to the top

Did you see if insurance would pay 

For bungee accident death 

Enough for a closed-casket funeral

Enough so that the video of your bump

Wouldn’t go viral mark you in digital eternity

As the stupidest saddest most desperate case

Displace for a moment the NFL guys

Who blew their fingers off playing with firecrackers

Or the dunce who stood a bad roman candle

Atop his fontanelle only to have it 

Explode erasing him instantly 

Sure hoped he’d had fun up to then

Or those nits who held tubes at their crotches

To achieve visions of prodigious priapic

Pyrotechnics and grenaded their jewels 

Crown staff and all

What poetic mayhem if not justice

For fool-headed ventures 

Katy Perry to thank for videos

Of her firecracker nipples thank god

All went well I can’t imagine the clause

In the contract that required a singer 

To allow publicists to place explosives

That near your heart so to speak

How many last lists proposed

Founding a culinary school in Somalia

To teach starving teens that a properly 

Sited sprig of parsley will grace

The daily pattie of barely moist millet

To Cordon Bleu standards and quench

Their hunger for art if not for protein

Who’s list even considers forever

Forsaking the land of too much

Self-absorbed acquisition

Sam Walton beloved business virtuoso

American exemplar who reputedly

Counseled his clan at his deathbed

How to keep the project profitable

To the last moment of consciousness

Reports do not mention they kissed him

Maybe not on the agenda saved for later

After his spirit departed

Business came first

Friends say when it came to real life

Sam had known that he’d blown it

c. J.S.Manista, 2015