Living Will: A Poem By Darius Degher

I'm thrilled that Darius Degher's first poetry collection, To See the Sound, has arrived in the world.  A while back, Darius gave me the opportunity to read and blurb the manuscript, and I was charmed by his wordplay, his quirky subject choices, his command of craft, and for the way his poems mix intelligence and heart.

Here's one of my favorites from the collection:

Living Will

While filling in his living will
he discovered the will to live again.
For unacceptable qualities of life
he checked the boxes on the form
for chronic coma, feeding tubes,
persistent vegetative state.

For a week he lived his testament:
didn't sleepwalk through the frozen foods
or ignore the glorious florescence.
Quickened by the canteen's quiche,
he lost track of what a colleague said,
smiled about a project gone awry.
He notched his deepest ever breaths,
exhaled slowly like a yogi,
was dazzled by his prism paperweight.

Darius is a musician too.  His latest album, The Coyote Cantos, is available here.

And here he is, performing a song from an earlier album on Swedish t.v.: