Requiems: number 1
Do you have to look at me to know I’m dying?
It smells it on me, through the phone, past the miles
Read about it at 1am, on a blog post through a dim screen
International call, this isn’t the kind of emergency
your mother stuffed those extra notes into your palms for
Click!
Wonder how I’ll do it, pills or pretty slits in my thigh
I have so many scars, they’ll scarcely notice another one
Click! Click!
“Pick up your phone you mother fucker”
#
Death has followed you, scarred you before you could appreciate its cruelty
It waited in that hallway, listened with you to the doctor
“Red meat, increases the risk of cancer”
Swear to go vegan and fail, over and over
The lights of the fast food restaurant visible from your window
Flooded with neon like a Vegas whorehouse
They remind you of the ones in the hospital when he died
Death sat in your bedroom and watched as we fucked
Unsure of what went where, one salted throat, four fingers slick
So loud and stupid, your mother put her pillows over her ears
and buried herself in denial
Death was thoroughly amused
#
She came for me the morning after, a single talon through my ribs
But you called me back from the dead,
wove a spell that kept me here in a restaurant booth
Modern day magician
So I wrote one of my own, put it where everyone could read
And tried to plunge to my death
#
I shaved my head and my eyebrows
I was in mourning, what for I wasn’t sure
But we still fucked, in that bed, in daylight
purification by orgasm
Breed me, leave me, never let me go.