PRE-FUNERAL
The in-laws have arrived,
in mourning clothes,
black suits, black dresses, black expressions.
The mother is old world.
She won’t change color until the next wedding.
The father steps outside for a smoke.
She turns off all the lights,
glares at the wall-clock
as if it has no business ticking.
He stays out there on the back lawn,
dropping ash and butts into the roots of the oak.
The husband still can’t believe
what’s happened.
He has no living parents
to do the believing for him.
And the phone won’t stop ringing.
He joins his father-in-law.
For the first time in his life,
second hand smoke feels comforting.
A neighbor looks out her bedroom window.
She’s dying to know what’s going on.
On the other side, a dog scrapes against the fence.
She too is curious.
The kids hang out in the dumbest of silences.
An Aunt is coming for them,
to stash them away in a safe house,
protect their sensibilities from funerals.
The count for people who have said,
“She was much too young to die,”
is currently fifteen.
The aunt is sure to add to the number.
The mother moves about the house,
tidying here and there.
Even in death, she doesn’t want her daughter
to be embarrassed.
The father keeps puffing away.
His doctor warns if he doesn’t quit,
they’ll kill him.
Not soon enough, he’s thinking.
STRIPPER GIRL
you don't know them
they stare at you so you'll know them less
they drag you off the stage
and into their fantasies
you're masturbation twirled with sweat and heavy breathing
it doesn't matter that
in the backroom you read Blake
that when the other women run through
their tassel spinning and their genital grind
you stand before the gates of Tieriel's palace
that maybe you're Myratana queen of the western plains
you don't know them
and you're an entry in their encyclopedia of perversions
they take your body without you in it
to them you're excrement you're death
you're this thing that can never have children
it doesn't matter that later
you'll open your refrigerator
to the thigh of the slaughtered pig
and the juice of the ransacked cow
and in the low light like
something hung over a funeral home door
that you'll write an e-mail to someone
who thinks you're still at school
and the slow scrawl of your fingers
will momentarily return you to your studies
until they finally slump
and you hastily scribble ’’love" down
and add your name
press a key
send it to the grave
The man is dressed in blue robe,
and blue crown.
He holds a torch high
in one hand
and the other wraps fingers around
a tabula ansata.
His face, the exposed skin of his arms,
are painted the same blue
as his getup.
If his eyes didn’t blink,
you really could take him for
a miniature Statue of Liberty.
A bowl at his feet
is for notes and coins.
He wants to be rewarded
for my first reaction,
how cleverly he
acts the part
of all that he is not.
That’s a common trait
in most humans.
It’s the stillness
that sets him apart.
Full tank in the pickup, cooler loaded up
with cheap local brew, radio on full blast,
three guys, three rifles, we’re on
our way to shoot something full of holes.
Hard week on the assembly line,
tired of women bitching in our ears,
we aim to let off steam in the backwoods.
Cruising at the same speed as the music,
when I spy, up ahead, a mother duck
leading six chicks across the road.
I brake hard and my two buddies
breathe a deep sigh of relief
when the pickup squeals just short
of this feathered family outing.
It’s a shock all round
that we don’t aim to hurt anyone.
The woman’s frantic.
“I’m worthless,” she blurts out.
At my disposal, I have
a telephone.
And words.
Nothing but words.
Her depression is
a child of her past,
quashed needs,
slain desires,
and she’s scrambling for
an alternative to death.
And what am I,
a faceless voice
willing to praise a life
it does not know.
It’s my job
to give her back her beauty,
shed light, lift veils,
massage, mitigate
and sound sincere.
Some of this I need myself.
For I am ugly, dark, veiled,
tight and uneasy.
I try to talk us both out
of killing ourselves.
There’s a question
as to who called who.
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