To jump start my heart and scream like a child
caught so safely in the net of a funhouse web.
To teach me good to do right by children
no matter what their sinister plots are
with their ropes and balls and make-believe –
because they will haunt us with their high-pitched,
off-key lullabies, keep us up like old people
who die in a touchdown moment
and become instantly hauntateous behind our bed-boards;
basements and attics froth with dying young, dying old
zombies, eyes white and swollen.
I could never reason with them when they were alive
and now they settle in the over-beams of my houses
with their flesh eating and their shock death smiles.
To teach me good and well not to be obnoxious and therefore expendable
in a society spine straight and serious about making it through the
night
(hammer doors over windows
pack silver bullets and holy water
kick and roll and run, watch the ground,
move).
To teach me to respect inanimate objects
that may someday turn on me
(the music box,
the TV,
the kitchen chairs).
To feel my pulse back in-between my shoulder blades
and to fully appreciate my tenuous life.
To jump start my heart
with ammunition, techniques and a bible full of knowledge with which
to flee the forces of evil
(I do believe in spooks,
I do believe in spooks),
to flee the forces of evil
and to cooperate with my lover
and to know the difference,
for God’s sake, to know the difference.
No matter how his age-old smoking grin
moves me to stutter-lust, do not kiss a man with fangs.
To watch the outposts of art and resist
the body snatcher artists who set up their dead, sterile chambers
and try to make you feel with your head
when I know full well you feel with your spine
and the alien comes for your spine.
Funny how an alien hates to see you laugh
with your spine and your neck going back,
laughing at your near death
when all your neighbors have been dead
all along,
when the boogie man gets the babysitter,
when you try to remember, recover
the angel who you are.
To see Joe Bob Briggs’ sexy hunk of sarcasm,
beer boots and green vinyl lounger.
To jump start my heart
the scariest, most horrible, terrible thing in my life –
my own heart, my own swamp thing heart,
turning on me like a blood sucking ghoul,
my own nature, trees throwing apples,
vines raping vines, evil whipping through my hair
like flies, bats, birds,
the voodoo of my friends.
To break from the forest of this acute lonely life –
an enlightened door through the fog,
the abandoned mahogany bed where I rest,
the five fingered hand from another being
trying to reach me –
and will touch me through the cold thick dark
and thereby, therefore, thereafter
I will be touched.
