The Funeral Home
"Unpleasant poems are proscribed" -Joseph Payne Brennan
(1918-1990)
This is deaths 'after-hours' slumber party,
a jazzy ground level mansion with only
one denomination. Musical chairs, group hugs,
joyless shuffles bound to starless symphonies
And splayed in homemade chairs of limp flesh,
claustrophobic rot, consummate in death's blood
summers, eyes turned egg white as in orgasm,
in the Bells Palsies of our deleted scenes.
The Latin clock grows a snarl at midnight, lit from within
like Hades' self consuming gnosis. It glows against nighttime's
poison dark, reading: PARENTSANDCHILDREN,
in case anyone felt left out.
A malformed beast's slaughter sounds
in obscene colors; the piper's parade goes on.
A beast of unsightly glory raises a foghorn,
and the train's whistle screams howling malfeasance.
On the beast's ride the lobotomized,
serenity personified, always asking
for a dry lunch with black milk.
Half amphibian, tumor ridden livers
protrude like exotic fish, shocking
their owners system suddenly, faces
tinting the window's fog, death masks
red as beets, searching for chalk lines
The trails of yellow sight.
"This is a silent car, gentleman",
a madman mumbles, and there is silence
at the table. Injectables are kept
under roman candles,
because no can be seen as what
they are. One lung sounds in the dark.
The drunk is polite but unsightly,
the suicide sentimental and moody.
No one recalls the dead office temp's name.
In formal motions unseen by passerby
they play a lunar jazz all night, and pass astral
spells picked from pockets already robbed.
Feet kick frantically in a sewer outside, waiting
for entrance to this sedate palace of moldering hope;
in willed plaga, even the moors are taken.
A malformed beast's slaughtered jazz sounds
in unseen colors and a parade goes on.
A beast of unsightly glory raises it's foghorn,
and the train's whistle splits in wind torn malfeasance.
There is a man in mind of open graves
and crawling soil, bound to starless symphonies,
dead inside a devil's eyes. Body silently aflame,
his brains sprout gravestones, in deep concert
with those who lay down their burdens.
and genuflect on train tracks,
feeding themselves to the shade.
