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.