Funeral Aficionado

It’s something to hope for, that the talk at your wake
will crack a rib, it’s so funny.

I see you over there. Hoping. Just madly hoping. You
practice draping your body

across the green, pool-table felt. You practice, also,
the rough Irish brogue so thick

that it runs down the mountain and smacks
straight into song.

There are worse things to hope for, like the paper-
dry attendance

of Episcopalians in black. Or like the brutal gestures
of a people hell-bent

on a future in white. I see you mapping out your last
moment on the canvas

like a Pollack or Basquiat. Drool, spit, blood,
a useless bone

or two to the wolves. And that fucking rimshot
eloquence that ensues?

It makes the ear deaf, shocks the solar
plexus like a roof

falling down on tomorrow’s
ghost.

100 to 1

As all the white coats say, “there’s a big question mark
here”. They are pointing with a pointer to my love life.
It’s all up there, with stock footage, percentages, ledger
sheets, and pie charts, and nothing in this room moves.

I dream that I fall from outer space into a carnival tent,
where lovers teach me to throw mud at my wounds.
I dream I am barking up the wrong tree. As per usual,
I am smiling a dastardly smile. I could flirt with flint,

something my dead grandmother taught me to do.
Not while she was dead, no, no séances or mediums
here, but when alive, in the cartel of her last years,
when she mistook the roof for the floor, and smeared

too-pink lipstick dangerously outside of the lines,
she could bloom like a desert flower in the night
of the right man’s knock at her door. She might
smooth out her frock, and fluff her hair, but

the real magic was this: Clark Gable or Gregory
Peck, whoever this man was, brought her home
to her senses. Lucidity reigned for a moment,
synapses stirred. So that while she was inching

every moment towards that thing that would
erase her, she could smile like a gamine and recite:
each president – living and dead – from Eisenhower
to Bush, what year it was, and count by sevens

back from 100 to 1.

Breeder Dream

Just when you thought it was safe, ba-dum-dum,
the dream unfolds upon you—
you, sacked out on the couch, many heady miles
from the one you love—
and you are living the bachelorette life
as best you know how.
The dream gurgles in your mind like a dying breed,
stunned and bleeding
on its way to its knees. And before you know it?

Twin infants present themselves
to your now fattening belly,
introduce themselves as two tumors
demanding your love and desire.

The rumor is: you’ll fall for those faces, you’ll wrap up
their legs in the quilt of ages,
first this one,
then that one,
love forked over for not much in return. That’s how it goes
down, without much of a fight,
(but what wins out is mother-wit, which tosses the halo right
into the dump).

You awake to find REM and your ovaries have dashed
out life’s obscene code
in illegible script, because now awake, you are actually
free,
free to roam the darkest, most uninhabitable waters,
without ballast,
without guilt’s anchor,
without twin regrets pulling the stern .