from Weirde Sister

 

 

With her three brothers Ann set out

 

On pilgrimage to C—

 

To learn what makes a life pleasing to God

 

And retroactively align Grandfather’s life

 

Within that matrix of ideals

 

They passed deserts where sentient blood clots roam

 

They passed transparent cities of caffiene

 

One of the brothers fell into a trap

 

In the sense that he fell into a giant spiderweb

 

Tragically he had a belly full of lunch

 

And was therefore extra appetizing

 

Like a human burrito

 

He shook the web & wakened up the spider

 

The spider was so big it had nine legs

 

Between the spider’s huge hairy fangs his skull cracked like a butt

 

The fangholes spurted sour yellow drugs into his brain

 

He hallucinated backwards fireworks, then died

 

Word reached the pilgrims’ camp

 

Ann mourned all night in bitter recognition of

 

Humankind as a farm league for ghosts

 

Why did her brother get called up so soon?

 

Perhaps a few words should be said about the departed

 

An important human being in many respects

 

As a youth he had constructed a twenty-octave piano

 

His brothers laughed as he sprinted along the keyboard

 

Playing his hideous concerto

 

He chronically had the opposite of a fever

 

He was born into his sister’s luminous shadow and lived there

 

Its light tanned him by draining his weak life away

 

His sister loved him but she couldn’t stop the tanning

 

He loved her too

 

They loved each other but

 

It’s not wise to have inhuman relatives

 

Even if they are nice

 

I highly recommend against it

 

The pilgrims reached C— later that day

 

Lit a ten-foot candle chandled with the tallow of a minotaur

 

They humbly asked their favors of the Lord

 

The candle rang and rang but God had it on vibrate

 

All prayers are full of magic words

 

But not all magic words are powerful

 

 

See this world is what is evil

 

Here where they push the kid with the lice down the stairs

 

Where torture is not confined to the realm of genre fiction but undergirds the apparatus of state power

 

Where people hate each other and hurt each other in addition to many other crimes

 

And this world is not Satan’s fault

 

Not Satan’s fault but ours

 

For we are those who ushered the grave into the house and gave it the best room in the house

 

Brought it coffee and snacks every morning and asked how it was doing

 

We thought the word-mist emanating from the grave was adorable

 

We noticed how the morning light crumbled upon its muddy surface and among the tufts of moss and pebbles on its surface

 

and the mushrooms growing out of it

 

And we gave all our painkillers to the grave for its own recreational use

 

Pushing each capsule into the mud with just the middle finger of the left hand

 

Until our rings stank

 

We took new family photos with the grave in the center of the family

 

And put those pictures on the mantle

 

And turned down the previous family photos to face the earth

 

And even you, when you came to our table

 

Felt a pang you later recognized as jealousy

 

And you fixed up your daughter with the grave

 

But she fell in

 

And when you remember her now

 

You feel a pang you recognize as jealousy

 

All this for a grave!

 

That’s wrong

 

We walk around, using two graves as shoes

 

That’s wrong!

 

We drive a tap into the grave

 

Collect its thin putrescent sap in buckets

 

Boil it down to drown our pancakes in

 

That’s wrong

 

We used to be able to be saved by books but now prefer to own them

 

We keep a list of names of people who we don’t care if they live or die and the list has seven-billion names on it

 

We must be insane

 

We must be wild-born to live this way

 

This culture channels my sororal feelings away from people

 

And toward the adulation of exotic figments

 

I wanna peel my heart like a old potato

 

I wanna feel it thrumming in its tangle of veins

 

The way a spider in the middle of its web

 

Senses a touch in any direction

 

I want to press my liver

 

To the psychic wounds and press it

 

Radically over the mouths

 

Of those I hate, nourishing them

 

Like vegetables marinated in a grandmother’s kiss

 

So when Satan appeared to me

 

I used my negative capability

 

And when he came in the form

 

Of the small dog with knife eyes

 

I said yes with my voice

 

So when he appeared

 

And vomited his smoldering document

 

I signed it

 

With blood from a baby’s dick

 

Extracted with a large mosquito’s dick

 

I made intense eye contact with Satan

 

I felt my traumas searing closed

 

Like wounds fused on the flat of a burning knife