An Apple in the Pie

I have become more of a short story writer and a poet than a novelist of late. I have been working on a collection of works that will, I think, someday appear in a book entitled An Apple in the Pie: A Study in Purpose. The work will be comprised of many of my older poems, the new ones, the final chapter of my beloved book, three short stories, and a few autobiographical narratives and personal essays. All of these explore, to some extent, the purpose of life at both the grand and microscopic scales--why we exist but also why we take certain actions. In the end, I suppose the conclusion is that the purpose is different for each of us, and that--but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

An Apple in the Pie

Wander the graveyard of those souls who have learned to die

Whose forgotten carcasses have long since become ash:

Oh, it's just another apple in the pie.

There is the steelworker's song of when all goes awry

And life ends with a cacophony of clangs and a clash:

Wander the graveyard of those souls who have learned to die,

There is the tragedy of the war veteran's unheard cry

As he swallows too many pills from the hospital stash:

Oh, it's just another apple in the pie.

There is the Christian martyr's sorrowful goodbye

As she launches a bomb on a shopping cart with a dash:

Wander the graveyard of those souls who have learned to die,

There is the obsessive-compulsive divorcée's ceaseless caw of why

Since her husband left their life together with the rotting macaroni in the trash:

Oh, it's just another apple in the pie.

Pray to Providence that their sorry souls have ascended to the sky,

Store their stories in some overflowing memory cache,

Wander the graveyard of those souls who have learned to die:

Oh, it's just another apple in the pie.