A Playwright's Death

The doctors' renewed confidence in a pessimistic

prognosis, like the house's edge in Vegas,

haunt his tired eyes that search frantically

for a different path to some other future.

"Everyone's death is like that." The friend

passing along happiness and fond hellos

likens life to an ongoing onstage rehearsal

with an unseen curtain always about to drop.

With life's wreckage looming in the shoals of mortality

His critics ask if there is satisfaction of another kind

beyond his lifelong iconic and carefully curated 

limits-transcending body of work. 

The playwright died with metaphors unused.

Vivid ideas daily douched away in a medicine bath.

He lay prostrate on the stage of a wrecked life

still wanting nothing more than one more act.

Afterwards, with luck, the fickle public might

recall a scene, monologue or phrase that,

grown so unaccountably large in the imagination,

fame's shadow leans across his grave.