They will leave my sins
In moldy boxes
On my front porch
For months to come
I will find them sitting there
When I get home
Drooping cardboard
Corrugation exposed
I will salvage what I can
Put the rest on the curb
Let someone take them away
Crush them
Bury them deep
Where the seagulls and rats
Can't reach

Perhaps in years to come
It will become a golf course
The place where all my wrongdoing
Has gone to rot
The one hole on which
Nobody can ever make par
The grass yellowed and dry

Thumbing the beads of her necklace
I can still hear her telling me she loves me
Costume jewelry resting on my black clad thigh
The only thing I have left of her
I lean my head back
Strain to remember her smell
The feel of her arms around me
As I bent down to hug her
I didn't think
That would be the last time I saw her
That I would now be actively avoiding one half
Of this small town church
So as not to have to see her again

I will never hear "Bridge Over Troubled Water"
Without crying
I will never play Scrabble
Without thinking of her house rules
The box scribbled with fifty years of high scores
I will never see a gladiolus
Without imagining her name in it

I slide down the pew
Grasp the hand of the woman I will soon
No longer be able to call cousin
As we sob together
Our loss mutual in this moment
But mine so much greater
Because I know what's to come
This is the last time
I will see these people
Before they hate me
Before they will turn to each other
Proclaim me manipulative and arrogant
I will tell one person
That I am sorry
For any part I ever played in their pain
That I can't prolong my own anymore
And now that she's gone
It's time I took my leave as well
The first words she ever spoke to me
"when are you getting married?"
I sometimes wish I'd said "never"

There is beauty in dead things
In blackened viscera and creeping fetid rot
A knot of entrails piled neatly like sculpture
Or funnel cake
Its body yards away mostly intact
The burglar's mask of a raccoon still fluffy and flyblown

A baby turtle as perfect as it hatched
Red dots painted on its nose
I want to pick it up
Breathe into it
But it's alone here on the side of the road
No mother to come shepherd it to safety
Something else was a shepherd
Left it to waste

We take our own dead
make them up
to look like life but the mark is missed
As if applying color
will put the soul back in its seat
We can't bear witness to sallow cheeks and sunken eyes
Because to look at our dead is to see ourselves
And death will never come to us
Because we exercise regularly
We go to our doctors
We eat raw celery
And drink only pure artesian spring water

We bring death to other things
For food
For sport
For clothing
We wear death proudly
Denying its access to us personally

But death will come
Regardless of your fear and staving off
And you will be beautiful
Like a broken necked bird

A leather watch band stretches as it is worn
Forcing the wearer to cinch it tighter
This I can understand
I also stretch as I am worn
Needing to be cinched tighter around myself
To keep from falling away
Getting lost in the crush of bodies
on the busy sidewalk
My face carelessly shattered by a passing stiletto
And left to tick away my last seconds alone

Standing in the humid night air
Beneath the old growth walnut tree
We are talking
About nothing
And the security light switches itself off
Our motion too distant now for it to trigger and flood the scene with too much brightness
I cannot account for these feelings
The cold sweat and tunnel vision
Of my blood pressure dropping
Waiting for the trap door to go out from under me
I know what's coming
I should care so much less
But as you take my cold hand in your warm one
And silence my chatter with your lips
My vulnerabilities are on display
With nowhere left for me to conceal them
If I allow this
Will you crack them open
To exploit their tenderness
Or mend their fissures to strengthen me?