Liturgical Violence: A Euology for Unwritten Eulogies of Those Who Lost Their Life and Lived
Out of love and out of time,
It’s true the last year ought’ve plagued my mind,
But I still feel the need to look inside
A live mind
To find what live there is inside after it already died.
Indeed, there were some wheels and satellites still spinning,
Even as it looked little like it did before.
Whatever game you’ve gleaned to be losing or winning,
You’ll find that you you once were is there no more.
And no matter how bad we’d like to break this pattern,
Can’t nothing bring Sun Ra on back from Saturn.
Even if the reaper does come for ol' Testicular Torsion Tim,
Whose left necrotic nut would be generously given to him,
He will never return to Planet Earth,
Will never accept entropic loss as sufficient sacrifice,
Will never take trash to show us our worth.
Still, it’s nice to recognize
That God is in that piece of trash, too,
As are all the bits of old me and older you.
As a result, I cannot suppress the shame
Of an instance when last Monday a click beetle walked through our door frame.
I was called on and told a demon came in for dinner,
Despite the holy water.
Two grown men hollering hither
To see a brown bug so big it could’ve been Kronos’s Father.
Quoth, “scared and unprepared,” the presumed roach
Was to be sent forth from his hiding, the knave,
And chased out the front door. Our space he’d not encroach
All so that his disgusting and unworthy life might be saved.
But I played too fast and too loose.
On his head fell the rack of shoes.
Still, he limped his way out the front door
all while furiously clicking: “Nevermore!”
By opening his mouth to speak he revealed himself
Not a roach.
And I felt my mind clarified
To imagine him terrified;
I felt gross.
Me, with my contingent consciousness and mystical wealth
Somehow believed I was more entitled than him.
I saw it! I risked his life on whim.
And if a tree really feels no trauma
Then whereof all this drama
Of Uprooting the earth? An Aristotelian attempt at going home
Fails devastatingly. At best his time on Earth reduced to loam
As will befall all of us,
Ash to ash and dust to dust.
It’s funny in the same way with women and men,
Who massacre and slaughter to keep pink or keep red
When they’re really just a touch of white apart,
As with race and with art.
All this and I still despair
At my destiny of waking up as my high school band director and living his life:
Fat and fundamentalist, no potential to have ever been squandered, no friends and no hair
With melted children and mennonite wife.
So it’s hard to be optimistic, to know what’s real and what’s not
When on the first day of June it doesn’t smell like it should in the foothills of the Appalachian Piedmont.
Still, if you were to ask me whether I’d rather keep my testicle sinister or those that left last July,
In a poem I cannot write a lie.