Featured Fifty Poetry: The Unbearable Lightness

The Unbearable Lightness
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Tony Hanik grew up in Chicago and transplanted himself to Toronto when he was twenty. There he found a job that allowed time (nightwatchman in a museum), a group of fellow songwriters who inspired creativity, and most importantly, a family with the lovely Veronica to ground everything. Tony likes to write and perform things that "work" and, when they do, that is the incentive and the reward.

I work as a nightwatchman in a museum and write songs and poems when so moved. "The Unbearable Lightness" is about the effect of being fatally intimate while completely detached. It is meant to disturb.

Gonna have me one of the collateral lives

With an unconfirmed death

Just vaporized

No pictures, no story

No last cell phone call

Like I never existed at all

Gonna die out of sight

Poor and obscure

So you can shrug and say

"We're not sure"

Not even a number

To mark that we fall

Like we never existed at all

That's why I'm so light

That's why I'm so light

That's why I'm so light

On your conscience

Death from Above

God's own hard rain

An "accident" is how

You deign to explain

Why no one's to blame

Not that you can recall

Like you never existed at all

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