Funeral Shelter

Hm.
Home.
Funeral home.
Far from home.

Would there be beautiful flowers beckoning all the visitors with their angelic aroma? I thought it would be nice and warm and she would look as beautiful as ever, wearing her favorite pink dress and her bandana. She always wore it when I came over to make spaghetti and apple pie. Maybe it would smell like her favorite perfume: the pink-looking one that sat on the dresser next to the cherub statue she always put her rings on before she went to bed. I remember how her house smelled like the untouched Avon flower soaps that sat in the corners of all three bathrooms for years.
This place didn't smell that good. It smelled like cardboard and dryers and it was cold as fish sticks still in the box. The flowers smelled like stale dirt and there were only dim, yellow lamps in the corners, except over the wooden box.
There she lie; Lillian, dressed in her ugly white dress and a wig on. Aunt Marianne probably picked it out for her. I was stuck there with all my annoying cousins, wondering why they weren't playing her records: the ones recorded of her in La Boheme at the Met in the 40s. you'd think they could have taken the time to lug out a record player and show her some respect.
I walked up to the casket with my mother to pray, seeing Lillian's perfectly toned, solemn, unsmiling face; this was not my grandmother. My grandmother always smiled.
I said one last goodbye, kissed my hand, and went to place it on her cheek; now the flesh-toned, rough mound of concrete it had become. I guess it was good that my first was so young. It made the last dozen a lot easier to get through. I am a creature of habit. Cardboard and stale dirt aren't so bad...

Heartsick

The sunset glow of his cigarette fades into the nightly abyss...

Strings have been tugged and tugged on,
Ripping bits of sore flesh from their warm spaces.
Wounds, unhealed, will remain,
Oozing forever with wasted affection
Despite the twice and thrice returned
That will maintain, but never satiate.

Seeds will be planted and grow falsely,
And when the bud blooms,
Realization will always return,
And chambers will long
To cease movement.

Art or artifice?...What's your choice?

Why are some people born with abilities and others not? I have a skill at writing and finding loopholes, at being a bitch and at being polite. However, math and science are a completely different story. Some people can run numbers like the bathroom sink. I can run numbers like a car without an engine. I was born to be in the art, not the artifice. The sky is green and the grass is blue to me. I don't care what the geologists say. A pound of lead is heavier than a pound of feathers. Because it is dark gray and stony looking. Not light and ethereal like a downy feather. This is what I respect. Aesthetic. Art. I'd rather live in world of fallacy that is beautiful than strip everything of its meaning and live a bleak life. I would rather paint the grass orange than accept its verdigris. I would rather write my own world together than have others write it for me. I will not stand for the structured definition of "life".

Aha

To know
Ophelia's woe
Is me and see her weeping
Willow tree, the same as he would, classically
Would simply be
Astounding.

Or hear
The sirens sing
Or Byron's loving
Heart a-roving 'neath
The moon and know it all too soon
Would have more truth
Resounding.

For now,
Realize that
They and we could
Not be wise enough to see
That such disguise is bound to the
Synapse that tries to
Comprehend.

Guy Fawkes

Remember, remember the fifth of November.
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot.
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
should ever
be
forgot.