Speaker For The Dead

speaker for the dead

i will not write your obituary.

i will not grow flowers from the mouth of someone who refused to look for what was beautiful, i will not make that beautiful.

there is no surrender, no good fight, believe me when i say that i have spoken for the dead and they say:

nothing, when you die i will say nothing because that is what is waiting, i will not write you an obituary because you will be dead. and i, the one speaking, would be putting words into the air about you, without you, and no defences against them because i will be angry. if you choose that-

i will not be a speaker for the dead to let you live in a memory.

i will hold you through this unbearable life and do what i can to make it bearable. i will not be angry if you ask me if you just ask me for anything other than an obituary. you can call me if you are lonely.

and if the world becomes too much to bear, you are not Atlas. let it fall from your shaking shoulders. and i will write the way the world ends, i will write you the way it feels to be free i will write you in another life a thousand alternate times in which you are you but not and still you this crippled fool, a light opera and i will write you anything if only you are alive to hear it.

and i ask the same of you; in the case that my mouth becomes a birthing ground for the bodies of small violence, roots to wind their way around my tongue and teeth for the trees to swallow me swallowing the empty earth whole, come no mourners and no words. let the decay speak for itself.

do not talk at my funeral. do not read these words at all.

the eat-your-feelings cafe

i eat past hungry to make up for the lonely. i eat for the empty chairs around me. this hungry swallows me whole. mouth turned inside out becomes a hole, becomes a table. table sits in front of empty chairs besides me. i am hungry. i am starving for anything more than nothing, something to feed this loneliness. empty mouth has hollow teeth. bite sharp in your own wicked. crave me to create me: inhale me whole.

That strip of smoke coloured sky up there is the heaven of these people. -Jacob Riis and the heaven of these people is the heaven of those people from a different skyline. we look at the same gods with different eyes. that smoke-coloured, bare strip of sometimes light is beautiful when it is the only thing to look up to. when they dream, they dream of a sky painted like the sunset they know and the sunset they don’t, red-orange-blue with a grey haze on the horizon. when these people think of heaven they do not dream. they are tired. instead: heaven is the moment between breaths. heaven is the uninterrupted night of sleep. heaven is eight hours instead of twelve. heaven is all hands unhurt, all eyes not blind, a body on this earth that can contain their souls. heaven is their souls unbound in the closest thing they know to joy. joy is the little kindness, the way the light shines down. heaven is the light. that sky up there is not a strip it is the whole sky, it is the might of all the heavens all these heavenly bodies resting on the earth weighed down by all the dirt and fear they are the light trapped between the lines, they are looking at a different sky and seeing the same gods. they are learning heaven with their eyes open.

such impermanence

what hungry animal is inside you starving, for love or some other strange affection. you beat it when it asks for too much. say: that’s enough. keep it ravenous and wanting, too weak to cause trouble. strong enough it doesn’t die to rattle your self-control once a month, year, however long you can put it off. don’t acknowledge the tears inside your linings, don’t ever need anything. that startling want breaks you, makes you long for such impermanence as love. there’s a reason i write about rib cages and women: you were made from the bones of a different breed. our ribs do not belong to us, and that ache always feels foreign even after centuries. a reminder you could not be contained just within yourself. you had to be made fleeting, imprisoned fading. had to be kept hungry so you could not be anything other than a mouth with which to swallow whole. from the wild you were made to want what could only be given. always that impermanent thought, taught to hold in and not take, take, take to appease your inner self. never having enough in the bones you were given, still trying to bite more. keep the beast and throw the body to the wolves- the insides will starve itself to death anyway. we were not meant to last forever. we were not even meant to live this long.

coffee spoons and teaspoons

i leave a spoon in the fridge while my mother’s throwing up. eliot measured our lives in coffee spoons, teaspoons, the things we love small enough to be scooped up and held inside our mouths. a sweater unraveling to leave me cold but still thinking i am warm. still capable of holding a spoon to my mother’s mouth, feed her panic with a soft voice to keep it from rearing its head. i wrap my lips around the edges of comfort and taste the metal of our loves. a white bowl does not mask the acrid scent of something bloody falling out from her body, something too large to kept in the same hollow space as her tongue and teeth and words. lovely how we fill our life-spoons with cough-syrup, sweet or bitter kisses, things that linger in a taste and still we can manage to have our mouths open, to fit the loving in. that we can hold everything inside us: a strawberry as big as my hand that leaves a spreading stain on the skin, the vomit dripping over the tiles, eight dry heaves in as many minutes, a shivering form only now realising it is cold, my own sweater i draped over her, the unraveling hem and sleeves, the nested spoons across a counter top with one missing in the fridge, the unspooling thread of time getting tangled up in things. was this once or as many as you can remember. each day i try to form the words in my mouth and find them a little less strange than before.

the genocide of xenophilia

there is potentially a spider in the bathtub so i’m whispering for you to kill it before it can find out. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill the bees, a flowering of destruction on accident. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill everything.

i am sorry that i am afraid of what is not like me, the wide eyes of a long-legged small body in the corner of the shower.

i am sorry i would still be afraid if it was you.

but no one knows why chimpanzees cannibalise each other. why we can murder ourselves. and still no one can explain to me why we have decided to kill the bees.

so in twenty years, this holocaust will be halfway complete and the earth halfway wrecked. what will be left?

(please come kill this spider.)

i am sorry to take part but this is how it goes. i am afraid and so i kill.

the world dying in small doses, a little violence in our breathing, every blink and motion an angry shudder. condone violence and yet wallow in the glory of a crushed body, the crooked neck of a mouse in a trap like a sick revelry.

our bodies do not enjoy completing deaths or so we say, reject it but reject that foreign alienness more and our hands move slow-motion to slam down on the bathtub and kill a body no larger than a fingernail, legs twitching in a gruesome little death.

it could have moved out of the way but instead chose to accept it. it is as complicit in this as we are- we cause the action and everything else allows it to happen.

but how could they have ever stopped it.

a history of sitting still in the face of something that you knew was coming.

a refusal to let yourself be washed away. no matter how deep the ocean is.

even if the real ocean is deeper than a bathtub flowing over, a spider refusing to choke and give in to a death by cleansing and the drowning, broken motions of something killed for no reason besides the irrational-

the silence of one body slipping away from view.

washing away the guilt of what we have done. how much guilt the world must hold.