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.