Sweetness lingers in spite of false threat of suffocation. He keeps lots of
pillows in case someone might want to smother him. All she ever wanted was
photos for the yearbook, scraps for the scrapbook, pieces for the quilt.
Someday it’ll all be just mementos in a tea tin, and dolls in a heart shaped
box. Someday she’ll be eating the dust and cursing the grave. Bracing for the
day he doesn’t come back, inevitable as monsoon rain, another price to pay,
another heartbreaking work of genius. When you die can I have your shadow?
Written in stone, written in ink, written in a name that cannot be erased. Said
aloud it becomes a story and all stories have inevitable endings. I’m wishing
for a John Irving epilogue but prophesy a Leonard Cohen afterworld. A heart is
just a vital organ, and I’m used to having those removed. A thousand years from
now it’ll just be me and the cockroaches immortal and living in the ruins.
Someday I’ll escape to tell the tale. Someday I’ll write the gospel of the
name. Till then I am harvesting the milk of human kindness. Drink deep and be
forgiven, a babe at the breast and innocent again. I want nothing and I am
nothing but all the nothing that I am is yours to lean on. I know you’ll take
my secrets to the grave. It’s all just words, it doesn’t have to make sense, it
just has to sound pretty.