All Men Are Mortal at the ECU

All Men Are Mortal at the ECU  

By Alex Missall

The anonymous sun had risen.

Onto eternities of nameless fate,

I found myself driving

with a displaced amount

of other vehicles

the interstate 

to a hospital,

then, as if the road were running

through a constant crossing

of flatland infinities,

toward the bottom

of a horizon

bled white.

Slowly,

the anonymous sunsets.

While driving home,

I switch on the headlights

and consider the suffering

my mother awakened to

in the ECU after cancer surgery,

the impossible moment

as time seemed to confront us.

With night a bookmark holding place,

I recount those confounding hours,

which only complicated the dead logic

to my own flawed mortality

while trying to read in the waiting room.