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

on the deck

on the cantilevered deck over Port Susan Bay the Pacific sun slants and casts vertical stripes across the old wood slats as the sun ascends the shadowed stripes thicken striking increasingly acute angles with the parallel planks of the old pine deck in a cockeyed square the sun burnishes two old pennies they flash suddenly, gleaming copper juxtaposed like jeweled game pieces on some ancient runic chessboard on the fir tree before me an irregular rank of fat sparrows stand like pawns in a row for a moment then they explode in a flurry the Cascades loom the pennies fade to pale fired brown the sun's hot tongue licks up the last iridescent jewels of dew from the old wood deck --Ross Bender

the bends

I got the bends this morning

came up too fast

from a deep sleep

in my dreams my old professor

was trying to dance

with thirty Japanese girls

vivacious, they kept changing costumes

he just stood there

stricken and pale

in my dreams I was always late for class

I kept taking the wrong elevators

couldn't find the classroom

I was frantic, unprepared

and my students were surly

in my dreams my dead mother

was helping me pack my bags

in my panic I couldn't find anything

she closed my suitcase

efficiently

and kissed me goodbye

even my shrink

doesn't want to hear my dreams anymore

but I can't stop dreaming them

I wake up with a start

I come up too fast

from the depths

with bubbles in the blood vessels

and the dreams just keep on coming



--Ross Bender