The Ghosts

Despite their official status

ghosts do not retire

or sign up for medicare

The bigger than life ones 

quiver with vivacity 

in the cemeteries of novels

and the tombs of movie palaces

where at this very moment 

Jean Harlow is slinking like a panther in

a dangerous negligee

and Jimmy Stewart is stammering his way into the heart

of a woman who has

pulverized his bashful vocabulary.

The city ones

still ride trolley cars

dunk sinkers in cups of Automat joe

and hawk The Sun on 

bustling corners.

Those closest to me, 

the conga line of relatives 

who were picked off one by one

by not so Lucky cigarettes,

the sandlot boys 

with their swat and swagger 

the bikini girls

who lost their tops

to a bottomless sea

and after dark became women 

in fan cooled bedrooms

lit by mason jars bursting with fireflies

are all still here

like the lightly dozing rose petals 

in keylocked diaries.

As for the ghosts

who continue to populate the civilization of my dreams

well, we’re in group therapy now

trying to work things out

and even though I still

don't fully understand them

the irony is

I can see right through them.