A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

Afterlife Poem
Saturday, May 19, 2007
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THE AFTERLIFE by Louis Jenkins

Older people are exiting this life as if it were a movie... "I didn't get it," they are saying. He says, "It didn't seem to have any plot." "No." she says, "it seemed like things just kept coming at me. Most of the time I was confused... and there was way too much sex and violence." "Violence anyway," he says. "It was not much for character development either; most of the time people were either shouting or mumbling. Then just when someone started to make sense and I got interested, they died. Then a whole lot of new characters came along and I couldn't tell who was who." "The whole thing lacked subtlety." "Some of the scenery was nice." "Yes." They walk on in silence for a while. It is a summer night and they walk slowly, stopping now and then, as if they had no particular place to go. They walk past a streetlamp where some insects are hurling themselves at the light, and then on down the block, fading into the darkness. She says, "I was never happy with the way I looked." "The lighting was bad and I was no good at dialogue," he says. "I would have liked to have been a little taller," she says.