Ode To The Captain

 Be gone, J. Evans Pritchard, proclaims the Captain,
   an actor in a movie, confronting another tyrant 
 dad, but too real
     with his sad smile, who made us laugh
  
 even as I dealt with parental edicts
 and you Captain
  were demanded to entertain,
 laugh. laugh.
 be a lawyer, you dumb fuck,
 proclaimed the mustache who conceived
 me
 words rolling over 
 consciousness
 like train wheels
 crushed cerebrums
    
    even as the Pritchards
 proclaimed how to laugh,
 smile, live, how to
 measure happiness. Efficiency,
    
 without just living, taking to the hills
  the skies, when we wanted it,
    and now the Captain who 
 taught Dead Poets, 
 to sound barbaric yawps
 proclaimed run-by fruitings a la Mrs. Doubtfire,
  is 
 dead. 
  
 don’t talk about sadness,
  smile, starched smile, take pills
  drink 
  don’t bother people, too busy
 masturbating
   conceal it all with a smile, a joke
 for I have told many jokes,
  
 why ask for love? intimacy? Jokes
   hide, like nesting dolls,
  Captain, our souls, sobbing
 kudos to you Captain. Even in death
 Pritchards from Dead Poets Society proclaim how to die 
 properly, to measure one’s coffins
 rhyme, meter, axises
 of superfluous
 to give elegies as impotent as Ken dolls
  
 I wear starched smile, wavering
    while people form friends 
   looking not my way
  
  without dissecting 
 true souls, without metrics,
 someone loves you Captain,
    rest 
 not lonely
  in peace, Captain, My Captain,
  for I too wear a cracked
 little smile.






   

Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction.  A native of Boise, Idaho, his work is forthcoming or has been published in journals such as Unstamatic, Door Is A Jar Magazine, Maudlin House, and Ariel Chart. Mir-Yashar lives in Garden Valley, Idaho.