There is a sad part to this story. It is called a funeral.
Funeral for fun, for spare parts, for time served.
We had it good there for a while, didn't we. But now I am watching you on my screen as they put your body in the ground.
You played ukulele with a hundred strings, tapping drum sticks together where all the members of the 27 Club partied Alice style and Megatron pushed the Cat into the ceiling died from cardiac arrest bottles were all over the room cocktail of Rx drugs and heroin, usually—that'll do it.
My kids never had the chance to see daylight, the eclipse, a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
They spent their short time in a glass-walled terrarium, standing on hind legs—geckos—churning the sun.
And if I advise you the short follows the long—listen to me. And if I advise you the hot follows the cold—listen to me. For these are the precepts of pain—a goddess lives here, sampling Jewish gods and mastery, monsters fornicating in the tall grass, laying down a codex of hair and blood and fingernails, never to fall, always to stand in the circle that's real a square, public figures shaken by the clock, squeezing water from a rock, there is and there isn't a way out—as according to Nails, The Way Out Is Through—and Mamet was in there somewhere.
I am a woman with a washboard, living in a Coen brothers film, ratty by the edge of the creek, baptized in an overhead shot (early Technocrane), busy with the business of washing blood from the end of one day so the next one can begin illusory, clean. Constructions of meek emotion saddled from a wrinkled face to your own—you are riding the wave but the wave is crashing. It is coming down upon your heads and only the lucky ones will make it long enough to suffer in our particular way. The fetus, fortunate, lives longer than the rest, carrying a glimpse of trashcan dream and Elton, sky livid, butterflies made of acetate and yarn, enough to break the fall of Gotham's caped crusader, directed in cineplex by a teenaged nomenclature—Dawn—her dream is to save it all in her rolled-up pant leg, walk from work one day onto a bus, that goes to another bus, that goes to another bus, that goes on and on to the left coast, looking out the window and there I am, there is the creek, there is the baptismal in Technocrane and she puts her hand on the window sliding down in condensation, the Joshua Tree is now located conveniently in a trash can just outside the California border.
We make a cat stew near your grave. After the tourists have come and gone, back to their high-rise, watching lesbians eating peen because we paid them to, after the commercials play, after the credits run, after the television slips into sleep mode, this is the second coming, not of JFC, but of my tonsils and my tongs, my enchilada stew pot, your sanguine is what makes the sauce special, special sauce borne from the ears, carried to the tongue, fragments of the frontal lobe—don't you know that there isn't anything but life? That all of it is living. There's no thing such as the dead. My forebrain liveth and reacheth out to other forebrains in the stars.
A cataclysm of nervousness.
A catechism fit for Queenie (was a blonde—her age stood still).
Parades of silverfish, carrying banners of rage, none of them with the depth of a couch cushion. This is what became of your children—they grew up in absentia of skill absentia attending spans between amniotic fingers, blowing their nose equivalent to blowing their minds, pushing a broom and smoking the nettles out of a thicket—that is the result of your diocese and your doctrines. Diplomas. Dagweed. Dogwood. Dirge. And simply death.
The harder you tend the garden, the more the nettles grow—the wilds, camping under the stars keep your doggy safe with you—nature will eat him like a Starburst. Yellow or purple—I think purple.
That's life in the wilds, arranged toothbrush like muffin, lined cacti from door to bed in the red room, interleaved by fetal caskets, read to sleep each night with a parody of pain.
No one feels it anymore—even if your fetus died you would have not the mechanism for feeling—anything—much less loss. Put up an icon that designates your sadness, then go into the thicket and drink a Mike's Hard Lemonade.
It will hit the spot.
It will do the trick.
See? No one even gets drunk in the future. It's all a play.
If the Great Mystery took over me—my sacred fetus, my divine—it would see these digits of zero and one, rocks running over the water, I pluck them out of me with pliers, my catechism feeding the funk soul brother (check it out now) you know there is a limit to the number of times I'll allow you to look at me with that counterfeit smile counterfeit being counterfeit culture counterfeit family countered by generations of systems and patterns and lies. Overdraft protection for your fucking mom. She says she loved me—kicked me like a dog. Told her it hurt me the words she used telling me I'll never make it as a mom saying the strata of her siblings would not support me that's when I started to brick myself in, cinder by cinder, birthing my babies in private locks—germination of a psychoactive toad—signal broadcasting colors—every little handprint stamped in construction paper—footsie booties knitted from spider silk—a rainbow of fruit flavors!—robber barons crossing the dentra with the dantra—twisting the mentra with the mantra—and only a princess with crusty underwear, smoking crack in an amniotic tree, could ever keep me company—she's an imaginary friend for the imaginary inhabitant of an imaginary room.