Funeral instructions
Call up a merry rump
to carry to the grave.
Dine below the buttery
church of money.
Dine at a secluded grave
on the horse of the house.
Poems on the topic: grave
Poems on the topic “grave” on Poets.by.
Self-Verification
old gray body
bound for no grave
for no grave
has issued us visas
and i am a law-
abiding citizen
which is to say i suppose
the law is my abode
so this carcass of mine
has standing
and grows more
and more abstract
taxed and insured
vaccinated and boosted
password-protected
two-factor authenticated
How to Care
On the last day of April, Facebook gives us a new way to react: a care emoji. Yellow generic-person hugs a disembodied heart, perhaps the heart that absence makes fonder. But to older eyes, unless you squint, it looks like someone clutching an open wound.
taking shelter
under my umbrella
mosquito
Superb owl, bad call
walking through the churchyard
where people have been buried
in good clothes
I hear the owl again
and do not look
PARIAH
It’s true, i was careless,
that one i was always shadowing–that
little light of mine–it gave me
the slip one night.
I’d thought i could allow myself
one unguarded dream, woke
to the baying of dogs & the beating
of a hundred pairs of wings–pigeons
with their automatic laughter.
I had to go live among the graves,
where no one looks for a wife.
It’s been months now.
Years, even. Time again
when night turns the crests
of the mountains white
like the hands of God on the horizon,
Harbingers
After months under snow,
last autumn’s leaves
barely stir in the wind,
pressed flat as ears
to the forest floor.
Surely they know what’s coming.
Stones lie askew.
Whatever is beneath them shows no sign
of resting in peace.
Initiation
Let him continue
in the ground, he
who is now dead,
where all things hurry—
a strange company
who seem to speak.
Let the pursers and clerks
make up their accounts,
the parson rest, and
the great night come
to sit with night.
Song of the Millipede
International Rock-Flipping Day 2010
I lived like a hundred-legged king
in the faceprint of an idol
who followed my every move.
What drew me to that house made of twilight,
whose rooster swelled like an ingrown toenail
trapped between toe & shoe
& never flew?
With floor turned ceiling,
where would the weather vein?
What rod would rout the lightning root?
Unreal estate no bank would back,
underwritten only by undertakers,
each inch of space had been stolen from a grave.
From time to time, I caught
the musky scent of soured hope
A long time
Waiting forever,
For her return.
Sitting besides,
A grave.
Mind filled,
Thoughts of her.
Maybe she could've,
Been saved.
Singing a quiet,
Lonely song.
About a girl,
Who lost her heart.
Her existence,
Became wrong.
So she ran,
To the dark.
One two
One moment,
Two meanings.
One incident,
Two feelings.
Two bodies,
One heart.
Two smiles,
One dark.
One cut,
Two inflictions.
One massacre,
Two victims.
Two deaths,
One day.
Two coffins,
One grave.
A Tree blossoms at my grave
Blinding sun-
My shadow, pause awhile
As you pass my grave
And I will be content with thee.
One day, life will bloom
From my remains –
Then, in its shade-
Stay, forever.
* * *
I visit
the graves
Great grandfather
under wild flowers sons
sons here now I
eye
of us all
but sonless
see no
hop
clover boy to stop
before me
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