I see dead people

living in Philly
I see dead people
it comes with the territory

my sixth sense conjures ranks of dead Redcoats
shooting up Germantown
Satterlee’s ghosts
George Washington’s voodoo slaves
hunching in chains round the Liberty Bell

I see the newly dead
I see the walking dead
the dearly departed
fresh meat for Iraq
the old soldiers fading away
at the VA

phantasms, wraiths, ghouls, specters
the grinning hungry ghosts
the pale white devils

I see dead poets
Whitman in Camden
Poe cooking uptown
Pound and Williams duking it out
with the bronzed Ben Franklins frozen in time
on the exquisite campus

I hear the shrieking demons
buying and selling pieces of phantom
nervous and edgy
dueling over real estate, turf,
plasticware, antiques, condoms, plates du jours, objets d’art,
the formerly owned

O purgatorial franchises!

bargaining, haggling, quibbling, wrangling
setting the terms for their rivals before
the other guy gets ahead
haggling like dead soldiers over Christ’s robe at the cross
the elevated spectral Host
let’s make a deal, motherfucker

whose streets these are I think I know
the devils are being raptured up
annihilated in the smart bombs
the dirty explosions
they’re all going home to meet their maker

leaving this stuff behind
this previously owned stuff
who OWNS this shit, anyway?

look now!
I see only sated grateful angels
dancing in the streets
and the dead are reclaiming their own

--Ross Bender