The rooster swivels on its axis returning
coarse wind into the pyre of mad, mad tongues
raving alongside charred ivory. Lifted by sorry hands
from dying embers’ embrace and eased with foreign pity,
ceremoniously, into a cardboard crate wheeled against
the traffic, stumbling backwards through yellow canvases,
between my family dressed in black, to dress the void (deck),
mourners spitting soda into their cups, as word paddle upstream,
onto a thin futon within four walls stained with unfinished ghosts.
The doctor removes the white shroud like God coaxing pink light
on the first day and wine oozes through elastic veins to the far corners of my skin thin ventricular walls. One crack, in the doors and in my chest, paramedics in white blur in, heel first,
Pan-island couriers on reverse gear to the corner
of a numbered street, where I am delivered like a gladiator
thrown into the arena of nosy gazes, with the urgency of
hens clucking away from premeditated slaughter:
deep Christmas red on the tessellated parking lot.
Clumsy thumbs dialing 599, I moan inwardly
to the concentric circles of strangers retreating, erasing
me from cell-phone cameras. Then like a flip animation I
snap backwards, up 21 floors,
pause for about an hour on the ledge before smashing
backwards, back down, past kids scratching graffiti off the cement
and growing cigarettes in their mouths. The rain ascends and I take
wet cash from the driver while I fidget on the leather and throw up
mediocre coffee into my cup. I dig into my throat and return the bread
to its plastic bag and when the cab stops I fall left out onto another parking lot,
moonwalk up the stairs to where I unwrite my name in the
annals of failure and
shove the Fs of my past back
then
I take the bus instead.