"Death's Doorman"

Remarks from the Fray:

It's a scene any introspective sort will recognize or feel empathy for; one is alone in a cold, dark room, staring out of the window, gazing at the stares and the spectral clouds passing over the face of full yellow moon, contemplating what there is beyond this existence. Is there something one goes to and finds an ironic eternity tailored by one's decided deeds on earth, or is there only dust, silence, a blank slate of non-being?

This isn't comedy for self-infatuation by default, but exactly the kind of exercise the mind plays at when there isn't the opportunity to engage with the world beyond one's own skin, and it's not uncommon to wonder, once one is done with the cerebral gymnastics to sort through their obsessions, loves and losses, to finally ask the variations on The Question: when does this all end? What will I say if there is someone /something waiting for me? What legacy will I leave? What will the consequences of what chose
to do and refused to do? […]

Death's Doorman by David Bosch, turns this theme into a two voice theater piece, and it works, surprisingly enough, for such a gimmick-tending conceit. I well imagine the introspective sort I described earlier in the bathroom, late at night (although a sunny mid afternoon would do just as well) staring at the mirror , envisioning all sorts of after life scenarios, asking every question , poetic or merely dumb, that he or she can muster, trying to arm themselves with a knowledge where an unavoidable fate can be made tolerable. It's as if the interlocutor is trying to reserve the best seat on the last plane out of Hicksville. What returns , we see, are one word answers, like echoes coming from a long , deep cavern, warbling refractions of what he or she had just asked, the keywords distorted and changed. […]

This becomes a brief and bitter comedy, and is something Samuel Beckett would have written as one one of his radio plays, the usual scenario of a character frozen in habit or ritual , redundantly trying to revive some earlier sense of coherence from situations or things. Bosch's second voice offers no inside information, provides no clues, but rather deflects the inquiries with accidental puns. This is a piece that doesn't so much ends as it does stops , cold. It's seems that this inquiry could go on indefinitely, right to the grave, as the peculiar narcissistic loop provides just enough variation in the malformed responses, the echoes, that one can proceed with it forever as if they were indeed closer to a Big Secret. Bosch is wise to leave the scene when he does, leaving us with a funny , if minor dramaturgy . One can, of course, seize upon any of the questions and their responses and find layers of implication and hence unearth every deferred meaning, but I think that's part of what makes the poem work so well. Bosch plays on the human brain's insistence on making utterances contain more than surface references, and it is a nice trick he's pulled. The character, the interlocutor , is trapped in infinite regress with his questions, and the reader, as well, might be compelled to parse each pun and skewed return. This might, then, be a comedy with two acts performed simultaneously.

--TedBurke

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I like "Death's Doorman," especially Daniel Bosch's intent, if not always his execution.

Here we have a dying man, literally at death's door. And whom does he find there? None other than Death's doorman. While waiting for the door to open, the man decides to kill time (pun intended) by asking the doorman a few questions. After all, the doorman's seen a lot.

And here's where I see the serio-comic aspect of this poem. We all want to know what death is like, what lies beyond death, how to die. This man has a chance to find out with his questions, and what does he get in return – nothing but a bunch of smart-mouth, mocking, semi-serious answers. I say "mocking" because that damned doorman has the very annoying habit of taking the last word of each of the man's questions and replying with a rhymed word which is often cryptic in its meaning. […]

I especially like how the sound of the truncated, abrupt short lines of the doorman throws me off balance, how it echoes the harsh reality of what he is saying.

I don't understand all of the "stanzas," but then death (and his doorman) are not comprehensible, are they? If anything, I would have preferred some scatological language from this smart-mouthed doorman. After all, isn't death ultimately an obscene thing? […]

This poem did have an emotional impact on me. It reminded me, in a very hard-nosed, postmodern poem, that there is no explanation for death, no way of learning about it except to push pass the doorman and go through the door.

--MaryAnn

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