Funeral

I look to my hands: swollen  of my grandfathers ilk.

I recall him,

Upon a ladder: drilling through his hand, cursing to the heavens as if the recourse itself was a way to exude his pain unto an unforgiving heaven, he wrapped it in a bandanna and went about his work as if daring god to question him further,

my grandmother now passed, i a pallbearer, the funeral more a reunion of lost progeny.

i placed my rose from my lapel deep in the bough of her caskets  arrangement, i thought of my great aunt ,how i shunned her funeral out of love, and how doped up for purposes of my own, i endeavored to honor this one.

The funeral home gentlemen like professional mourners in other countries, merely more adapted to our customs and so in no way idiosyncratic to us, the very act of toting a body to its resting place and the need for some form of primitive closure denied by us all.

As we dress well for the occasion and shed tears.

Traffic went well on by as we prayed forlorn and multicolored, and the sun a presence though it was to rain, all I could think of was how much I never really knew this person more than i was allowed and how i would never be such a distant star in a black night to my coming legions of eventual zygotes bearing my stamp.

I thought of my mother, her skin a mere rasp, mine as well, my father , and brother, all of us destined to dirt and yearning im sure to face it without fear.

I woke the next day hungover from narcotics and fear, I still haven’t breathed the last breath of all those I’ve lost, though they have breathed theirs.  If only existence were a hunt and we could mount our victories, but it is a silent endeavor, we celebrate it in tombs at night.

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