Obituary
I won't fail at this like trying to fix a leaking sink without mud grease or washers tinier than Cheerios. At least I won't die without the sense of absolving myself from crimes I almost committed, would commit, if more time. My sudden death from an overdose of nail polish remover & six white bottles of liquid drain cleaner should surprise no one except for Aunt Shelly who went near sighted when she learned that Uncle Lou spent his deciduous desires on rubber necked whores who handed out condoms like chocolate cherries to blind children. Such are the repercussions of a problematic probate.
I've spent so much energy on curtailing my leeching lust from infecting a whole populace of slim listeners who smelled of Listerine & bones in formaldehyde. It's amazing how I grew more aquatic on Sundays, preferring fins to hard leather oxfords. I had to piss off in some small way -- the shoe shine boys with their eyes of tie-dyed mermaids & copper pennies minted from the 1930s.
To my main benefactor, a scraggly rust-colored mutt named Leo, an artful disdainer of failed commands & burgeoning promises of spaded poodles, I bequeath several hundred dollars' worth of massage therapy & sessions with a dog therapist trained in the school of canine Gestalt articulations.
That doggie, a constant companion in my days that grew listless as the man who reinvented the Morse code. For years, I walked inside a white balloon, thick as Mylar. My memories grew as dense as Malaysia.
I became a parasite that could chew its way into its own flesh. I dreamed of an ending that could put a spin on a life more vapid than warm tea or the long vowels uttered by amnesiac sailors against a howl of distant sea.
I could discern no beginnings or endings, only the vast middles that engulfed me. To my last lover, still unconscious from sleeping past alarm clocks set to Gregorian calendars & not remembering a single word from those chants, a thorny stem & a picture of a headless man crossing a bridge of sighs. Too bad we couldn't live the life of high octane pleasure & low level nicotine.
To my mother, buried in her high heels & mink of a thousand webbed thoughts, I donate the bulk of my gratitude: the implied cuckoo & crates of marble songbirds stuck to the Pleistocene walls of Father's study. Oscine or is it, an obscene life? To Father, I bequeathed the emptiness that Mother left him, passed on to me through ink-stamped Xs & Ys & I often thought of them as two zygotes dreaming of the anatomical symmetries of Classical art & then rolling over, away from each other, forgetting where I had been. I am the sum of their dual procrastinations: they forgot to cut my tail bone, long, ossified, wrapping itself around their legs, strangling their varicose vicissitudes. & it's getting so hard nowadays to get around in this bubble-scooter & the neighbors never concede that they've given me up for dead already. Such is the tragedy of modern locomotion & if I don't get a move on, shake a Quail's feather, being ever so careful not to squash her eggs, I might be late for my own funeral.
END