Ballad-Broken-Death-Song

'Sin Titulo', Paz Errauriz

I've been with you before, but am not in your past. You mark my face, eschewing chaos for all the times you could've spoken, but did not. You hold my nose open. I slip down the fire escape. Run through the jungle of each other's long-gone last. Have you been, tentative, you ask. I shake my head. You shame my rotten mouth. We lay together. Flowers. Last year's birthday, only some children die. Not so lucky. Call shotgun. Little chest swell under Mozart. You tangle your fingers along my hair. Get stuck inside a web. Am I, black widow-like, the burier of people we lost. I looked for singing children, and found only broken dads.
You say, come. And I do. Back to the ringing of crisp-cut alarms. Of mornings cold, and white-press shirts against collar, too tight. I remember much of what it was to be presentable. How much our parents made of it. In presenting your children to the world, you hope they'll make one proud. That nobody peeks behind the fine-pressed shirt, the belt a little gnawed, and biting into belly swole-out. You're only a person, you, and hope nobody minds your children close enough to see. To say. The ways in which you, as a father, come up insufficient. The smoking kitchen-hang mothers. The affairs. The shouting. The trying to be quiet when the children have gone asleep. The staying up late and not being able to sleep. Borrowing books, and feeling jealous at the fancy edition your own folks couldn't afford. The handouts from a dying woman, old as bones, vanishing in on herself. And you don't know. Whom you don't know. Hawks to the palisade, come for books that should've been yours, because he was your father too, and the old woman never quite learned how to read.
A family album of fuck yous.
We have to wake up now, kit. You call me, remind me I've no reason to frown. I, after all, have continued to live. I have made my mother proud. So then why does it feel I bring only shame by my name? Heavy-welt around my broken neck. And it would have been today.
Shopping for shoes. Eating pralines. Aye, even playing the piano. I never consider in my imaginings the piano, and is there a piano, still? Does it break your mother's heart, or would its absence disturb her even worse? That woman, frail, with her kind, skinny eyes.
Come on. Firm. No longer messing 'round now. You're a man who'll haul me by the shirt-collar, and choke me outside the bedroom, still, because sometimes, that's needed to shake off the trance. We do our best to forget - us, living folk - just how compelling death can be.
You're here. You honor my phantom of a thought, and why didn't we go today? Because there's living to be done. You let me sit inside this fantasy of graveyards for just twenty minutes, before you rap on the door, and rasp inside my throat. Wake up now, kit. Wake up. There's been enough loss already, without a bright young thing like you getting stuck.