From Grave to Grave

Swept up in the madness, clawing through dirt. I’ve buried myself in your drawings, you still choke me, it hurts. The graves beside with thickened text plot against me with dates as I vomit out the worms. Recycling creatures, you’re recycling sex ed teachers and verbs. I realize I’ve been bound at the spine with chains to the bottom of my coffin, trying to rise again. It’s fine for Lent, I’ll give it up and then...spineless. I could never stand as tall beside you as I normally would in kindness. But my desiccating corpse still wants a piece of the living.

Flesh rots. Muscle-tied knots. Mouth sewn shut to prevent me from screaming as your weight fell on top of me over and over again. I begged for the release of your worms behind a wall of wood. All that I could have done, all that I should. And then the rain comes, packing in the heat, choking off the air from the bottom of my feet to the top of my soiled hair. Pain and dirtied seats and beds and chairs. Somehow, you look worse for the wear, even as I’m crippled beneath the shadow of your haunting stare.

But I keep crawling to the next grave, then falling. With you now. Eternity has not been kind to you. Neither has your family. A modest stone, I-Ching wheel and Yin-Yang steel. I rap at your wall. Can you feel? Or was that ever still so complicated a matter for you? White dust I laid on your eternal bed, the crumbs of your unconscious, the rust of your mortality, medicine or skeletal dread, or perhaps the dried fluids of every man to share your bed. I cannot remember, it all falls apart in my head.

Perhaps my consequence is what remains of you instead. It bathes the ground I tread. It speaks a soft whisper as pillows, and weaves through the weaping willows like thread. Threads of my love, placed in a basket, hoping to one day wed.

But we are both dead.