sciatica
6: The Green Knight (2021)
i guess it was on the way back
from my grandfather’s funeral
in saffron-painted Tempe
where most of his children are/were still alive
and explained how he would kill the engine at a red light,
restart the car when it was green.
i turn off the lights compulsively,
grind the tube of toothpaste like a motorized mangle,
reuse the tissue until it’s a melted candle.
i can’t crawl out of the architecture,
trapped like someone too fat to fit the door
of someone else’s Christendom, when people
were shorter and slimmer.
i was too wide for the airplane and any shape
i made myself invited an axe into me,
the way a child permits an explanation through its
feeble fortifications.
i would too shirk at Christmas Morn if my back
would even bend me down.
i remember once on some other less vivisecting family trip
sleeplessly
sitting in a bathtub,
reading someone else’s
cinematic residues as they mused into a memory of
Welcome to the Black Parade and
indoctrinating myself
to the idea that
you never have to be at peace with death.