There's a Stream of ConsciousnessRunning Down My Leg

My poems aren't funny. None of them are. They're morbid, depressing, humorless, and I go to great lengths to make them that way. At my interior, I am not funny. I'm still hateful and enraged, but more scared and tender than my jaded exterior will admit. And at my core, I'm afraid of everything, of dying and living, of failing and succeeding, of floating away from terra firma, and of being forever grounded.

Now you know.


Drawing you in while I'm pushing you away,

Cindy



Death Clerk

Someone has to keep the words.
So I’ll do it.
I’ll collect the unsayable things.
I’ll save those images,
preserving the last black detail
of their livid and rotten horror.

I’ll catalogue the anguish
and the heartache, when
no one else—being wrung out
from grief—
is up to the task.

I’ll stow the truth
discreetly away,
touching it with my
own bare fingers,
like an elephant
who happens upon
a fallen friend,
tugging memory back
and coiling the relic
toward an observant kiss.

I might tremble at first,
flinching forward in
small and tentative steps,
because I am still
a suspicious creature.

But I will look squarely at it,
staring through the shadow
to a pinpoint of light
I only just realized
has been trained on me.

This will be my work.
To keep a record
hidden in plain sight,
the way lace and tulle
shroud assumed tears.

I will codify ephemeral clay;
the imploding temple sensate,
documenting its decay,
its hold on each of us—
spectators to this never-ending
parade of entropy.
And I’ll fill space
with caves of loss.

Outside the cloister, denial—
itself a strange kindness,
can flourish—veneer unblemished,
its motives, unchallenged.