The Haunting of the Ol' Fisherton Bay Morticianary, Pt. 1*

The nights were longer, as though at bay...
It's time for the artist to make his way.

"It's a mighty profitable business,
isn't it Hugh?"

Said the mortician to his dog.

"These ones are old...
Almost as old as you"

As he worked up his corpse,
for its last and lonesome grog.

"Off to burial, this would see,
off with the other one,
whom ever was he...
Off with you too sir; old wasted chap...
Make for the wedding soon,
of woods and crap;
I shall expect a clean and smoothly slit,
to slip here this trap.. and finish it quick!
his final dance; adieu.. farewell..
Soon riddance will follow,
of you as well."

Yelled the mortician to the delving man,
To take over from here while still he can...

A.r. Bazian
Jan 26th, 2016

Gather ‘round, warriors. This is your time.

This is your time to shine. It’s your day in the sun. It’s one-of-a-kind, o ye cheaters of death, but this is, nevertheless, your finest hour.

You found a home in war. You entered into a contract with bad company and gave up the rights to your body, your mind, everything but your mortal soul. They took advantage of the circumstance and you wound up deep in a bunk hole, hiding behind the tenuous wall of a manure pile. Bullets whizzed by your ears, fear possessed your frames like a demon taunted by the Lord. Death swooped in to put it’s fear into you, but you all laughed in his face and spat in his eye, turned your back on him without saying goodbye. Perhaps “See ya later” would have been appropriate. 

But no matter, husky gladiators. It is time to rest from your battle. It’s time to put away your swords and scabbards, your spears and your slings. Your automatic machine guns and your hand grenades. Your potent strains of anthrax and your agent orange. Surrender your arms, troglodytes. Cast them to the ground below. Consider the clatter they all make as they fall to the pavement. Take it in, breathe it all in, make it yours…

…for it IS yours.

Sorry, we didn’t get around to telling you. It was always yours, we just figured you would find it out on your own if you wanted it bad enough. No, I would agree: that is NOT fair. And I would also say this to you, “Fairness is a relative concept. When you consider the value we placed on you actually knowing this as a fact…well, I think it should be pretty ****** obvious. Don’t be a *****, you give all servicemen a bad name when you do that, you know?”

But enough of the self esteem-building fodder all, that is not why I have gathered ye here to-day. Nay, not even close. I have brought you all here together because I wanted to be the first to tell you. You’re all going home. That’s right, you’re homeward bound. Soon you’ll be able to pack your **** and take a southbound train to ride. You’ve lost your minds killing innocent civilians, you’ve struggled to keep your eyes open most nights, as staying awake meant staying alive. But you’re going home! Warm nights tucked between clean linen sheets. Soft goose down pillows to bore your heads into. The smell of coffee in the morning, bacon and eggs if you’re lucky. The prospect of another day that won’t be defined by the number of lives you’ve ended between sunrise and sunset.

The journey home will be a victorious one, indeed. You shall see it from the comfort of a first class seat on the most expensive airliner we can afford! A small bottle of gin or whiskey is only a few feet away and all you have to do to get one is ask the attendant. If you ask nicely I don’t doubt she might let you have more of those little bottles than administrative policy usually allows. But she sees it in your eyes…you’re a grizzled soldier. You’re still warm to the touch from the heat of battle. You know this. This is who you are, it’s what we made you. And she will sense this. It will drive her mad with desire. Her knees will quiver, she’ll blush, she’ll radiate ****** charm…but all you’ll be able to think of is that Vietnamese farmer with the plaid shirt. 

A ***** plaid shirt. Dripping with dark, brown mud, he smiled at you from beneath the brim of a straw hat that looked as if it had seen many better years. A smear in the drying clay was on the right side of his face where he’d wiped sweat. His lips were dry and cracked and his nose was a little runny. 

The buttons on that plaid shirt were the cute mother-of-pearl finish jobs, the kind that snap shut real easy. How many men would have noticed that? How many of the sharpest minds in the known universe would have missed how his left boot didn’t quite seem to match the right. But you caught it right away and you stored it into that immense data bank that is your United States Marine Corps certified brain. 

If only you could forget it, though. Right men? I see a few tears in a few eyes. I know I’m on the right track here, so if you still think I’m not talking to YOU, I have an invitation right here in my back pocket that will entitle the man to whom I give it a 6 month stint in the back of a mess peeling spuds. You don’t want that, now, do ye? What? No takers? I thought not.

But where was I? Oh, HOME, that’s what I was on about. You all have very nice homes, no doubt, and I’d bet there’s not a single one of you who isn’t just itchin’ to get back to ‘em. Is it the one you grew up in? Is it one you just bought? No matter, when you leave this place it will either be in a body bag or on the better side of Uncle Sam, who looks after all of those fine men and women who have risked life and limb in his service.

So what’s it going to be, worms? Death? He calls often here, and don’t think I don’t know that his is the song of the siren to many a worn out Spartan. But faileth not, loyal comrades. 

Will it be insanity? Will the wage of life and death struggle prove to be nothing more than a tug-of-war between lucidity and madness? Yer going home, grunt, why should it matter? Either one’s better than lying face down in a pool of your own guts. Don’t worry about it, just get on the plane. Baby, it’s your ticket to ride.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

I stepped onto the tarmac with a firm determination to forget the last 2 years. Maybe even the last 15. I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m just tired of looking for an answer. I’ve listened for the still, small voice of reason and wisdom, but it seems to have stayed behind in the battlefield. Probably where it belongs. 


The night was cloudy and the stars shone like pinpricks in a dark black veil that covered the most brilliant light…ha, I almost said “life”…I may not have been too far wrong there. I wanted to cut the cord of gravity, float through however many miles it might take to reach one of the punctured holes. Then I would tear the fabric and crawl into the other side. Disappear into the brilliant aura.

Only a dream, only a wish. I drug my weary frame from the bustling airport to the highway. An old two-lane road, dangerous after dark. It doesn’t bother me. It’s purpose is to facilitate the traversing of distance from one point to another. I could care less about where it could lead me. I only knew that I would not turn back no matter where I wound up, so I stuck out my thumb and waited for someone to give me a ride.

Does anybody stop to give rides to strangers anymore? I wouldn’t. It’s not something I condone. In fact, I have only done it once in my life, when I was just a kid, before seeing “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”. After watching that seminal film I resolved to never, ever pick up hitch-hikers again. I wasn’t going to help anybody on the side of the road, either. **** being a “good Samaritan” if it means getting my brains blown clear out of my skull, flung to the side of the road like rotten fruit. 

Despite all of this I still had my hand stretched out, thumb in the universal position that signifies the need of transportation for the “down-on-his-luck” traveler. I remember asking myself what could be more pathetic. I was reduced, by circumstances beyond my control, to hitching or hoping that someone might be clueless enough to pick me up.

Yet, that is exactly what happened.

A hookah smoking caterpillar sat behind the wheel, and he seemed glad to do a small kindness to me. He could tell I was a veteran of psychic wars. He felt obligated, I was sure.

“Hop in, friend,” he said. “I can see that you’re a little down on your luck. I been there ma’self a time ‘er two. Just throw yer pack in the back seat and climb up here with me.”

I wasn’t shocked in the least that a hookah smoking caterpillar was driving a GMC Jimmy east on Route 66. It did, however, give me quite a shock to think that he would pull over and offer me a ride. I am no fool.

“Off we go,” I said to him. 


The road was a long one that took us out of the state. As we crossed the line the caterpillar turned the radio up real loud and started singing along to a Journey song they were playing on the classic rock station.

“Ooooh, wheel in the sky keeps on turning,” he wailed. “I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow!!!”

I turned to him. “You have a very distinct grasp of Steve Perry’s vocal mannerisms. Have you ever sang professionally?”

“Oh no, not me. I could never go onstage in front of a lot of people and sing. I just don’t have it in me.”

“Well, you aren’t afraid to sing in front of me. What’s the difference between one stranger and a hundred strangers?”

“Oh, it’s not that. It’s not that at all,” he repeated. “I had a friend who used to play and sing in a lot of the bars on the circuit between California and New Orleans. It was a job to him, you know? He told me about a lot of the stuff that goes on in those places. He told me how one time he was singing a Roy Orbison song when some pool-shooting loser throws the cue ball right at him. Beaned him on the forehead, BOP! Had to hurt. Said the bruise swelled up so bad directly afterwards that people started calling him “the Elephant Man”. I was a beginner in the days when he regaled me with these anecdotes and mister, I’ll tell you, he put the fear of God in me. I was so terrified of getting conked in the head with a pool ball that I never pursued the craft.”

I felt a tinge of sympathy for his plight. “I’m sorry to hear that. I bet you would have been a star if you’d gone for it. Bigger than Steve Perry, even.”

“Oh, it’s okay. I don’t feel cheated or like I’ve missed anything essential to my happiness. As long as I’ve got wheels, my hookah and something to put in it, I am a happy caterpillar. Remember that: I am merely a caterpillar.”

“I will do that, but you’re a caterpillar who could kick Steve Perry’s *** any day of the week!”

“Wheel in the sky keeps on turning!”

“**** straight…I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow!” 

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

The caterpillar held the wheel steady and kept on truckin’. He sang along with every single classic rock song that came on the radio. From Kansas to Boston to “Sweet Home Chicago” he knew them all and, to be perfectly honest, he did a **** good job. He belted ‘em out like Springsteen, he crooned like Bryan Ferry, he croaked like Joe Cocker, he wailed like Janis Joplin, he screamed like that dude from Slayer. No two ways about it. This hookah smoking caterpillar had serious talent. 

I was curious. “So, mister, what to do you do for a living?”

“My friend, I am a mortician. I deal with death every single day. I do a job that most folks would find distasteful and not a little disturbing. And yet I love my job. I do, oh yes, I do. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the whole world.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said. “How does a man get a start in a field like yours?”

“It’s not too hard, really,” he replied. “You come with me, I’ll make you an apprentice. You lookin’ for work?”

“No, sir. I can’t say that I am right now. Still got a little cache stashed away from military days.” I made a gesture with my hand that signified that I was grateful for the offer, but would have to pass. “Maybe one of these days I might change my mind. I think I could handle it. I’m not squeamish. No, not at all.”

“Oh, I’m sure you could handle it. I can tell by the way you look straight ahead, you don’t look back, you’ve got a grip on everything in this world and you think there’s nothing that could ever shake your foundations, whether it be from the east wind or the west. The north or the south. Do I read you correctly?”

“I reckon you do. I’ve had a hard run most of my days. Experience has taught me one lesson, but it taught me good and well: Nothing is as you really think it is, and it could all be gone tomorrow. ”

There was a Mortician I used to know
With a chin of whiskers and sallow teeth
He didn’t comb his graying tresses
“Moonlight commence your drip” muttered he
But his hair grew stringier and his ligature looser
A man ever dingy with mourning

Shrouded with death was his visage
A man of fifty, shriveled like a rose
If you spend lifetimes watching milk curdle
And leaves stiffen
Traces of mortality will wrinkle you the same

Acrid appealed to the Undertaker’s senses
Drank black coffee to match his hue
Used to cloud lucid skies, he’d wipe out the blue

None spoke to him but the drawing room mirror
Listen he didn’t to its clamor of tongues  
For a reflection’s to blame for receding flesh

Thirty years conducting funerals
Built a morose man
Quietly he wept
Though a furrowed rose cannot
Thus his quietus was born

Bodies lie in juxtaposition,
All dead except for the Mortician,
Though these few have died
He'll take them and hide,
To **** them in ****** up positions.

I am crippling away at the thought of not being here next to you without the slight of your smile against mine
And I realize now that I have taken for granted every moment our hands have accidentally touched
And your smile still brightens my world and there is not much light in it at all without you and without you
I think I’m driving down the wrong side of the highway without my headlights on
Without you I think I am a pen that has long ran out of ink and at this point I’m just scratching away at scarred paper.
There will be no time to heal when I don’t want to heal when I’m not with you.
I’m trying to learn how to be my own mortician with all this alone time.

Society is a mortician.

It will try to make your life a coffin.

Then it will try to make you fit.

If you don't, it will gladly
cut off, your arms, legs and brain
so that you do.

Do not allow it. Be your full self.

Stretch your limbs; use your brain.

When the time comes, lie down and
stretch out on the rich earth whole.

Laugh at the mortician. Die like
a warrior, the same as you lived.

  ~mce

The papers said she was a small-town girl
from Massachusetts, an aspiring actress with
the looks of Hedy Lamarr or Norma Shearer.
The boys, they liked her minced walk,
those black curls and tight black dresses,
But it was the smile that won you:
An aphrodisiac painted deep red.

The picture didn’t do her justice.
I examined her body on a cold slab on metal:
Black curls, upstairs and down, matted with
Dirt and blood. Body, cut clean in half.
I bent over to get a look at those eyes:
Death hadn’t yet stolen their blue.

Folks say she didn’t care for school, but studied
Movies religiously. She was determined
to be known by the world—one day,
With bags and ambitions, she fled
To California. Reporters called her a vagabond amongst
Other Lost Angels; no permanent address,

though her mother received letters every week.
When the cops brought her in to identify the body,
I pardoned the girl’s condition; I had not yet
Stitched up the sides of her mouth.
I hear the leeches got to the daughter first,
Calling up the poor mother

With some cockamamie story that her
Little Betty had won a beauty contest.
The mother answered their questions proudly,
Never the wiser, never know she was
Ghostwriting her own daughter’s obituary.
Betty’s pretty picture was soon plastered across

Headlines and the evening news:
I could still hear the mother’s shrill screams
From a few hours before. I had kept the girl’s
Severed body draped, to give her
Some dignity, but I couldn’t hide
her Glasgow smile.

her mouth was sandpaper.

her mouth was sandpaper
and she spoke like
a smooth surface,
words scraped into fluidity
like a wooden sphere,
turned over behind teeth ‘til all friction
is lost.
she spoke like the walls of a birdhouse
in the room of a dead carpenter:
pretty unassembled things.

her mouth was sandpaper
and every kiss chafed,
rubbing raw my lips
and tongue
crafting with each touch
drawing blood like
juice from an apple,
like sap
from wood already cut from the tree.

her mouth was sandpaper
and she told me
i bite my lips,
rip at
the inside of my mouth,
cannibalize myself cell
by cell.
bone saws in her mouth.
the only difference between teeth of jaws
and saws
is mercy
(and she swallowed her mercy long ago).

her mouth was sandpaper
and she spoke like a carpenter’s hands:
rough palms,
tough pads,
a utilitarian artist
a crafter of dead flesh.
a mortician for dryads
and kodama.
the art and the artist
in lips
tongue
and teeth.

her mouth was sandpaper
and i brought mine to hers
again and again,
her bitten-rough lips
opening like doors to
purgatory.
less entrapment than addiction -
returning once more to nails and hammers,
hell’s blacksmiths below
heaven’s painters above.
coming back home
to the space between,
to bone saws
and a carpenter’s hands.

her mouth was sandpaper
and her voice was carpentry,
her teeth bone saws
her words
birdhouse walls.
her mouth was purgatory
but her hands
were hands.

her mouth was sandpaper.
i held her hand
and chafed my lips raw.

The sun tipping over the horizon
Lifts my lids each revolution of this Shady green sphere...
And for a few brief seconds
The fingers of sleep
Drag me back.

Warm pressure on my eyes,
Pooling, (re)opening them to the last
Paradise;
The only oasis where your eyes are not closed
And your bones are not dust somewhere
Mingling with the soil in Pittsburgh.

Just the same, I know you're the product now
Of some hypnagogic state;
Of the last traces of theoretical DMT swirling in my brain
As is leaves Morpheus behind in the shadows.

You're just the most beautiful hallucination
The truth in the chaos of dreams
Cluing me into what I've been denying
For 13 years.

Impossible that I've preserved you better
Than any mortician could have
In the recesses of my mind
You are a perfect replica
An unholy copy of the original
All creamy skin
And ocean eyes,
Full-lipped smile tipping somewhere between
Arrogance and joy.

"I'm gone," you say. "I'm dead."
Repeating what I already know
"I'm dead, I'm not coming back."
On repeat like the worst kind of ear worm;
A carousel of sound that dips and weaves through every filament of Unconsciousness.

Denial; like reaching out my hands
I shove against the reality, against the unreality
Against the prison sleep has woven
And crash forth
Damp and gasping
Like breaking the surface once more
Teetering over the horizon with the sun
Into the waking hell of another day.

The carousel makes another revolution.
See you on the other side tonight.

When a boy tells you that you are the only one and
It feels like the inside of a morgue to kiss him
Do not ignore the taste of dust and formaldehyde

Do you want to catch a movie
he asks in a voice like chocolate milk
Or maybe you'll catch chicken pox instead

You don’t really see the difference anymore
Either way you get these marks along your skin
that burst and glow like tiny fireworks

When a boy who carries a knife in his back pocket
and who has no scars on his fingers
tells you there is something special in you

do not believe him
do not stop and ask why
do not look back

He will not be able to tell you anything besides
how beautiful you are
He will not mention the depth in your mind

He will not sigh at the light casting shadows on the planes of your face
He will not talk about the slight curve of your spine
or the curl of your toes

When a boy who seems like paradise threatens to sweep you off your feet
chain yourself down do not be caught in a whirlwind
you were made for more than *this

All of those identities that end in "t" and "r" and "n,"
make us feel god awful and self-conscious.
Singer, artist, writer, musician, mortician, poet.
Who entitles us to use them?

And it's true, your voice touches in between my shoulders,
and melts to the bottom of my stomach when you croon,
but you don't find yourself an apt enough player of the voice box.

And sure, painting the reasons why I woke from your dream,
might seem like I'm an artist, but I rather just say...
I enjoy painting.

And right, we like to etch words into books and alchemize
the desire to question into stories,
but we're just fans of reading.

And you know, when the air cradles the harmonies of your guitar
like newborn unicorns, I want to point and claim,
though you think you know too little to call yourself musician.

And yes, the way we lay our bodies to sleep every night sometimes hopeful we don't rise again,
is much like how we treat our desire to declare ourselves,
but that makes us only those who give the dead away.

And of course, my blood courses in order to stitch and weave worded thoughts like these together,
because they lighten our concerns and brighten our better qualities,
so of course,
yes,
I know,
Right,
Sure,
It's true,
I am a...
I might dabble in poetry, here and there. No big deal.

People out here thinking  life ain't worth living
So they take a life.
I guess they find worth in killing
More worth in drug money
More worth in pride
I wonder how many folks died
Shot dead because of a  side eye
It don't make you a man because you ride..
For your crew
It don't make you a woman because you lay on your behind ...
For your boo
I don't love the streets but I love the people in them
Locked in a mindset can't find there way out of the system
Forget the street rules!
The G-code!
The hemoglobin soaked street code
I'm not that guy.
Father in law behind bars.
My dad shot yeah he the one that died.
I will only die for Christ's sake
The one that died for me when I was ***** as a used ****** on cracked asphalt.
I owe the streets nothing!
Yet I must to tell them about the blood of Christ.
Understand if your blood covers the streets it does nothing!
Just death ..pain..a open chest.. Mortician's and Funeral Homes
In the streets everybody stiff stuck  rigamortis

Virginity
My virginity was bang, a brain against a glass-tinted window. It was child-locked doors and ax cologne. It was too much muscle and a 13 year old body to weak to tussle.

My virginity was a man who made **** seem like an art, the same systematic way the mortician dissects the cadaver. Striped from a name like i was nothing but a corpse

It was the bruises left for weeks. The ****** teeth marks left upon my once sacred body. It that deep voice with Alcohol on its breath.

Yes. My virginity was a ******* earthquake. It was 7 minutes of the worst kind of hell. 7. Where I stopped believing in heaven. Trust became the law, fear my bible. I watched as my foundations crumble. and I knew that this Earth was no longer safe to walk on. It was the aftershocks running down my spine and me, a vacant building constantly about to tumble

So here I am. 3 years later, standing in his rubble. mistaking a kiss for his fist. It's been panic attacks in grocery stores. It's been 3 years of hating myself more than anyone else possibly could. It's been 3 years of
Self blame
And the shadow of a girl I became
Unworthy is a word that takes up so much space

It was the carrying the scars of my last binge.
The night I convinced myself if it burned going down it must be holy water.
Finally Salvation
drinking so much I couldn't stand.
Drinking so much I could no longer stand myself.

I familiarized myself with the taste of concrete and forgot the smell of old books.
constantly looking for a new hook.
Blowing halos of smoking trying to make death look beautiful.
I found myself in a deep dark hole
Oblivion.. My only goal

Lately, It's been learning my body isn't an apology.  
It's been learning that bravery  cannot be measured my a lack of fear;
some times it takes a ******* soldier to look your demons in the eye and say.
This is my body.
I am the beautiful owner of busy breath.
I'm that  shadow girl with a storm inside
No I am not that bruised soul in the empty bottle.
It's been 3 year of convincing myself that This world, it needs my voice.
It's been learning I am a miraculous dance floor of glittering molecules.

It's been learning that You will never have a greater opportunity to learn to love thy enemy, when your enemy is own holy, holy self.

We were born to die alone in the dark
A dissected corpse, a desiccated heart
Loose limbs tightened with rigor mortis
Broken bones and emptied bawls  
Becoming a morticians doll
To be posed and paraded before
Our loved ones

This pounding in my chest
It hurts my love
It hurts so much

Because my mind well it's decaying
And what used to help has stopped
Everything has stopped

So I need you
I need you to do me a favor

Take my heart
And unravel the veins
Like you're untying your shoelaces
Then kiss me tenderly
Let me close my eyes
And weave flowers in my hair
(daisies if you can)
And tip the mortician so she does a good job on me

Then when my body turns cold
And my lips are sealed with glue
Just know in my final moments
I was thinking of you

So wipe away your tears and get rid of that frown
Cause baby I'll be happiest when I'm in the ground

run the halfway house.
the winos will be showered,
fed,
and then led
back
into infinite night.
they talk quietly to one another,
waiting,
and by the time
I have finished my 3rd cup of coffee
some of them are in the park
drunk already...

...eyes burning like a locomotives furnace,
eyes flutter,
a half spin,
the man kneels and then falls.
others just stand
and stare
as if already under the mortician's
knowing smile.

and yet,
some will rise
from bright mists at dawn,
cherubic and dew covered
survivors of the night's storm.
grim miracles
who will share a bottle with a friend
and then laugh
at the selective kindness of good men.

between the burning furnace and
the chill of the night
hungry strangers are waiting.

a new day begins.
all is quiet.

I still perform autopsies
on our dead conversations.

Watching a Funeral From Afar

I live in a high rise apartment on the fifth floor  
There is a funeral home just across the street
Every couple of days I watch through the closed blinds
All the cars and people gather to say their goodbyes
I never watch from the balcony, I do not want to be seen
And I try not to stare

But it always gives me morbid thoughts
Sometimes the parking lot is overflowing
And there are great crowds of people outside after the services
Other times there are not so many cars and people

Is that what it all comes down to?
You led a good life if your funeral is standing room only?
The longer the procession of cars to the burial site
The fuller your life was?

I imagine there will be lots of extra  parking at my internment
Please forgive my pathos and self pity
For I am a schizophrenic hermit who mostly sees the world
From the closed blinds of a fifth story window
I wonder if it would make any difference
For me to know how many people went to my services

I wonder if I will know
Or even care
If you could go to your own funeral, would you?
I have just a glimmer of hope there will be better things to do
If I am worthy when the time comes

But what is so funny is the car
Almost always parked on the side of the funeral home
A white Corvette
I hope it is the mortician's car
Because oh the irony of a mortician sporting a white Corvette!

The cemetery of my mind, my body under my heart shaped grave

frustrating spits of rain over my last bouquet that had withered over months. The time I took to fix the stems seems useless as it still decays, beyond myself;

I stay sealed in my casket, a frame on the shelf with my smiling face. I was lost but still -

touching veins, delicately shaking under sheets of white; that then lay me to rest, cold cuts into dead skin

leaving my flesh to breathe in the smoke from stairways of light - resting, left-overs in the morgue.

My corpse unfinished, their hands curing rigor mortis. I hear the mortician whispering, ‘it takes time’

but this void of life inside means I cannot feel growth. His words echoing past my unaware sleep. I’m beyond saving and I show nothing. Aside from,

grinning for my funeral

storytelling was god’s first gift
to humanity,
a way to embalm our histories,
to dress them up
just as a mortician might paint
the dead
to give the illusion of life—
the mirage of
immortality on our own terms.

and so we become this patchwork of stories,
tales sewn into
the very fabric of human existence like
some great cosmic
game of telephone stretching across
13,000 generations
of **** sapiens who lived and loved
under the same
canopy of distant, blazing stars.

but like the stars, we too die; we
collapse upon
ourselves, upon the weight of
our genetic code
spooled out and stretched like thread
until there is
nothing left to give—no more DNA
to copy, just an
empty tomb, the stone rolled away.

if only death were a simple thing,
like how our brains
can go on autopilot on our commute to work.
i’d love for us to
be able to hand money to the bus driver
and say, smiling,
“all that is mine i carry with me,”
and board the
bus heading to Somewhere empty-handed.

in this fear of a Somewhere, we’ve
turned god’s
gift into a weapon, sharpened
our walking
sticks into spears, melted our
shields into
double-edged swords, named
one side faith
and the other side belief.  

we cut down those whose beliefs
are different
from ours without exception, as if billions
of years ago
we weren’t all carbon and hydrogen atoms
bonded
together, spinning slowly in the dark expanse of
a frigid universe,
the very foundation of the celestial blueprint.

as if millions of years ago we weren’t
a family
huddled by a fire while the fifth Ice Age
raged on
outside, making glaciers out of  mountains.
we sat together
and swapped stories, painting our lives on
cave walls
using sticks and crushed beetle shells.

in this century, we collect new converts like
captured pawns
on a chessboard, as if belief is a battlefield and
the price of
doubt is a one-way bus pass to a Somewhere
that tastes
like brimstone, milk, and honey licked clean
from a lion’s
ribcage: a hint of ash mixed with sweetness.

because all evil carries a hint of god,
doesn’t it?
he made figs and floods, broom trees
and plagues,
trumpets and leprosy, blessings and
curses. at night we
fear that no amount of weeping or
new covenants
will make the scales fall from our eyes.

so humans, in our finite wisdom
can only
say, “all that is mine i carry with me,”
and pray
to Yeshua, the deliverer, to Adonai, the
Lord, and
rest on the seventh day of our rebirth
so we can
wake at dawn and see that it was good.

some days we can be like Jonah in the
belly of a fish,
wise Solomon on his golden throne lined
with idols, Job
who cursed the day of his birth with every
breath, Naomi
whose bitterness begot the still-born name Mara,
so long as we
remember to carry that which belongs only to us:

love.

the lanky mortician with wryly looking fingers, oh the poor boy.
The hospital asked me how the body should be cast.
Such a funny thought to wrap you up in white linens,
your favorite colour.
Before I say goodbye my dear Eugene,
"Do you find it all right, my dragonfly?"

I can hear you asking, "James why do you cry?,
Make the most of your life, while it is rife;
While it is light."
Before I watch your flesh go,
Shall we look at the moon, one last try?

one two three
a loop in my head
i count my steps
to the grave

one two three
breaths in a row
faltering
atlas under a globe of grief

one two three
the mortician mutters
hitting the lever
a box in descent

one two three
relatives
trail off
weaving through the stones

one
matriarch in shambles
a perfect pietá
lingering by the hollow

two
a couple broken
separated
by the greatest door

three*
wails punctuate her sentence
goodbye bill
I’ll always love you

i didn't know you quite well
i just knew you hated
yourself
and loved disney films
and musicials

(i hate musicials and disney)

we sat at the same lunch table
2013
i remember your cotton sleeve
wiping across the corner of my left eye
because there was a storm brewing in them
and it flooded

you talked of
that boys don't know
better
and told me to stay
strong

how can someone who is not strong themselves
encourage me to do something
that they can't even triumph

you fell ill around december
or was it november?
i can't remember.
you almost followed the footsteps
of your lost nephews (two and five)
why couldn't you absorb your nutrition?
was your destiny to see the mortician?

(no.)

but you left the hilly suburbs of ohio
to go where the sand storms
and the palm trees sway
and the salty bays lay.

alex, alexandria
(defender of man)
i still remember those sleepless green eyes
filled with defeat and woe
and yards of wavy tangled brown hair
that flowed.

Rozbliuto- (noun) The sentimental feeling you have about someone you once loved, but no longer do.


--A weakness spreads through your body as if injected. Your chest is rising abnormally. The breaths you take begin to reign supreme. With every evanescent blink you see how they said "goodbye," and you let yourself walk away. Thoughts reverberate "not to say that you would change it; being for the best".--


The back of your mind stands, opening itself, like the curtains that precede the silver screen.
Half-heartily you allow it open through your chest as well;
breaking through the sternum, like a bad mortician.  
The action forces self-perception, virginal, seeing who you truly are ; intense enough to note how your heart is beating faster and slower, at the same time.
You start falling backwards, if you could only step back through the mirrors that are-now the pupils, maybe your feet would still be touching the ground.
The inanimate objects around the room dance, swiveling.
The goose-pimples rise, bringing a chill you are reluctant to deny.
A cold hollow fills you from the inside out.

(Here you are.)

Uncomfortably content in your own memory theater, still watching the films of your life pass you by, like the hazy cast of a rainy day.
You feel spring turn to summer, fade to fall, curtly the brisk kiss of winter caresses your cheek bones.
Your eyes start welling, although you've decided against closing the lids.

(Try to remain delicate, from now on reality is and has always been imaginary.)
  
Next the "why-not, if-only, and what-if's" start racing around above you.
Forcefully you change the direction of this inter-monologue. An almost automatic response: "Did they not care? They were a lie".

(Now the anger sets in.)

You have a bloodcurdling urge to kick, scream, and punch.

(After all, imagine it as-if you're paying forward what they let you do to yourself.)

Instantaneously, the last grain of sand in the hour glass drops, the distant cousin of Tetanus tightens your jaw, cracking a few teeth..   And a chagrin sweeps your face.





(Your head lifts with the sunrise, you sit up and walk out the door.)

A breath of relief, as the new air fills your lungs.
Heart is still beating.
Brain is all but completely intact.
And nothing was left behind.

I put on mascara today so you would find my corpse perfect
(all that existence is, looking beautiful for earthworms)
then realized that you could not open the tomb –
yes, the worst part of distance, the last person I see will not be you
(and the mortician will not know which dress is my favorite).

Only you, only you know about the burgundy lace
that we said makes me seem like a dwarf princess or psychic –
in it, I could call you from the past even when I am gone
you would be the king of every maggot delivering my messages.

I would eventually ask to be excavated (and if anyone says no,
please do not have mercy upon them, sweetheart –
wish that they catch the measles or chickenpox or insomnia)
so you could see the sallow skin I blanched even more just for you
the palace in my grave did not matter when you weren’t there.