Inside the urn
There is a space left
For us: the dying memories.
The things left are thick and hard
In amongst the packed in ash
Of our dead loved one.
Just a small pocket
The last breathe
For you to feel
Inadequate
Scared
Alone
Lost
Or
much worse things
make the sturdy base of it.
Count Gesualdo
Filled with rage
Had his men kill
His wife
While she fucked her lover
Who, dressed in women clothes
Begged them
Not to kill him
After her.
They stabbed him in the body and head.
The count went back into the room
Saying “they are not yet dead!”
And stabbed them over and over
And half cut off his wife’s head.
It is hard to cut off a head.
Your wife’s head is harder.
Her face, her body.
Then he went back to his castle
And wrote
Magic.
The dread from inside
Keeps coming out
To remind you
That the beautiful love you feel
Can not last.
The head will be cut off,
The rabbit will run
Half headless
Into the darkness under the ferns
To die there alone
Panicked and starving.
But that little rabbit
Held trembling
Alive
Kisses your fingers and looks at you
So honestly
Because it needs you
And you can feel its small body
Breathing and shivering
And settling down in your lap
It forgets that there is a world
Away from your lap
That wants to eat it
And boil it
Or put it in an oven
Because its better that way.
That's how you eat a rabbit.
Didn’t you know?
The days are long and hot and sick and drawn out now. The days are long and dull and hot and sunny so that you have to squint in glasses or take your glasses off and close your eyes for a while and feel that heat, that dry heat on your face, on your eyelids so that when you open your eyes you can feel the heat wrapped up above your eyes in the compressed skin of your eyelids. The days are longer and hotter and your sweat is hot and salty and as annoying as flies so that when the flies do come and hit at your face not wanting to land just hit and tap at your cheek and forehead you wish that all you had were those little drops of sweat. The days are so hot you sit there waiting for that one drop of sweat to roll down and feel all the nerve endings cheer as that drop passes over them and carry that drop down to your chin where you wipe it off. When you wipe it off you look at your hand and then out over the plains, over the fields, over into the next lot where a small family sits, still, as still as you, wiping sweat and swatting flies. Nothing is moving these days; the heat; the death; the three dead cows out in the next field. Sitting under your carport, sitting in the shade while the sun heats up the ground, sitting watching the rest of the earth’s surface baking and dying, sitting watching the three dead cows you own that are dead and the other family watching you watching your cows watching their dog come out from the shade and go back in to the shade. The days are longer than ever, they days now are so long because there is nothing you can do, there is noting anyone can do but sit and watch their cows die or wait until a fly comes or a drop of sweat forms and travels down, tickling your face and neck and being absorbed into the neck of your shirt. There is nothing in this heat but a small family, a husband and wife and two children and their dog, the little boy still alive enough to run around, pick things up and put them down and try to get the dog to move around but they are just like flies moving around. There is nothing but the flies and the heat and sitting there looking at the sun keeping coming and staying and the dust bowls and the dust storms and the yellow grass and the dead livestock and the other livestock not dead yet and something like a heart or a soul urging those claves, silently urging them to get under a tree, go down to the creek and drink. The heat in your joints, under your arms, under your nails, in your hair, as you run the sweat through your hair with your hot nails it’s as if it thins your hair and you look at your fingers to see if any hair is caught in there. The long hot days of death and loose hair and nothing else to help this, this…coming after three months or six months or so a year. The sickness in the throat in the community in the day every day; another dead cow or calf or sheep or whatever animal it is this time. Just the cool night to keep the foxes coming to eat the free flesh of these newly dead meat bags, these unsaleable thin cattle, these leather bags with air and bone, these things that stand there like troopers in the sun, not moving, shallow breathing, eating weeds, prickly weeds that poison them, sickly small white flower buds that the bees don’t touch. The hot days with no pollen and no water and no livestock and no respite, no shade, just under a house, under a half leaved tree roots exposed through the drying dirt, under ground. My youngest boy, now a teenager, has the long drawn face of an old cattle man although he has never drawn cattle or mustered a single beast or killed a calf for food because instead he has dragged a newly dead mutton sheep up from the bottom field and we have skinned it and cooked it. My youngest boy has stopped being a boy because his father told him he must go down and drag that dead sheep up from the paddock and so he went and as he dragged that heavy sixty kilo dead body through the dust, the sound of the dead thing dragging in the dirt, that’s what did it, that’s what did that to this face. My youngest boy dragging a dead body up for us to eat because we couldn’t eat anything else and he knew he had to do it because his father asked him to do it son so he just went and did it and that is how it happens, when you do it like that, when you do it because your father tells you and in your heart it is that you have to do it so you do it and that is how it happens, that type of face. The heart aches to get up and go down and take those young cattle by the nose and lead them down to the creek, the heart doesn’t want to see them, when you are here and they have trodden like that, hard step after hard step, half fumbling like you never want big beasts to do, their stumbling hurts you in the most human way, so that when you get them there you want to see them drink it in, drink something but to have them meander around wondering why you bothered to lead them down this steep incline that used to be a river to nothing, then you can see that they are dead and you put them in a grave they can’t easily walk back out of. What we did was take that old trailer full of half a shed down to the quarry and tip that out into the pit and go back and get the other half but there was more and go and dump that in the quarry and go back and get the rest, fill the rest up into the trailer and have a beer and drive back down to the quarry twenty minutes drive and dump all that there into the pit too and in the end you couldn’t really see what we’d dumped and the birds came anyway, optimistic birds to go through the shed looking for something but there was nothing other than wood and rusted corrugated iron and nails. We drove back and Mike handed me a lit cigarette and I took one puff and let the rest just burn down.
There is no emperor
All along I knew They were to be watched over Oh Lord I gave them a chance To be true To be in love But they were little devils My Lord And they deserve Everything. Even the taste Of the devils liquor On their lips Wasn't enough To stop them Kicking and screaming And gnashing As they do in your hell Where the lost Struggle for love, Love they could've had If they weren't animals still.
The devil came and asked young Werther
We had a child
That died
But that was so long ago
It now feels like
We had a life
That will never exist.
“Why don’t we have another baby?”
“Because you are so upset.”
“I think I am ready.”
“But you will always have lost a child
Forever
And the personality,
Our hope for this child,
Will be always
An imagination.”
The witch lifted up her gown to reveal a horrid stench the likes of which I’d never smelt and it wasn’t what was under her skirt, she released a little creature hunched over, like a half baby thing with a thin white skin and she said “so now you see what there is” and I had my hand to my mouth, or more, I had my shirt over my mouth and nose. “I wanted you to give me what I wanted not give me this, thing”. The thing as it was fell over and hugged itself, like it was dying and I moved over to it but the witch hissed at me and said “don’t you dare touch it!” and I stopped there and asked “what is it?” and she said “This thing came from me because of you”. I moved back, put my clothes back in place, looked at the thing and then back to the witch. “Do I need to do anything with it?”. “No” she answered. “You gave me nothing”. “I can only give you what they give”. “They?” There is nothing for me here, only waste and disease. I give her the five hundred dollars, collect the little dying thing in my arms, against her screams for me to leave it alone, I push her over onto her bed and get the hell out of there.
Antoine calls and tells me a name. I barely get to say anything back, really, I say ‘ok’ and that’s it. The thing squirms next to me in the passenger seat. I don’t know whether to clothe it or kill it. It has the face of a man but the body of an infant platypus, that’s the best way to describe it. It has the essence of wings and the legs of a chicken. Perhaps it is a child angel? Who knows what she is capable of producing. She brought Angela back to life, her rotten corpse giving me a few more lines from her dead carcass, her jaw barely able to make the sounds needed to tell me who her killer was. She was yelling for most part, screaming about how the afterlife is so horrible and all that hate inside coming out in a gross guttural blathering until she gave up a name and we could let her soul rest and her body went limp as soon as I called it off and snuffed the blood candles. Fucking witchcraft.
I don’t know why but I wake up and have to vomit. I can only get as far as the sink and it comes out, it’s yellow and black and blood. Christ what the fuck is happening, these black magic arseholes getting inside me. I go back to bed and the thing is there, already bigger, about two feet now, its wings growing and its face more beautiful than you could imagine, I start crying and holding my stomach, something is wrong. I move it over and there is mucus or whatever it is on the mattress. I try to pick it up but it starts to beat around like a wounded bird so I leave it. I get my phone and call the witch that gave it to me but she doesn’t pick up so I call Damien instead. He answers straight away and I tell him what I’ve got. He laughs and tells me to feed it fruit and I ask him what to do and he tells me to wait until it’s bigger and moving and I ask “then what” and he says “just call me”.
Days pass, I leave strawberries near its face and watch it grow and shed its soft early feathers and grow proper limbs and more and more it smells of flowers and not the gross death smell the witch had. I decide to leave it in my apartment and go out. It’s not five minutes after I get a coffee that an old man in a brown suit stops me and says “Do you know of the Christ Saviour” and I tell him I do and he says “He knows about you too” and I say “I know” and he holds my arm and says “He wants to love you” and I let him go and know that he is both right and assuredly has no idea what he is talking about. I have a new born angel of god in my bed. If I told him that he would try and give it to a priest or someone or else he’d have a half alive child thing in his hands and he would be killed by a demon as soon as he left his domicile. The people do not know about the war but some of them can feel it.
It’s a child now, what looks like a ten year old boy but it’s not a boy, it has large wings and thin legs and a face that looks like a Botticelli painting and makes a soft lyrical sound like a woodwind instrument coming from a soprano. It hums a faint melody that makes me cry again. I cry as I make a pot of coffee and roll a cigarette and finish my coffee and pour myself a scotch and want it to stop this crying/singing/soulful lament thing but I go back in the room and see it’s even bigger and I put a few apples and half a watermelon near its face and it looks at me and I cry harder. I leave and smoke my cigarette in the kitchen. As I finish my cigarette, dousing it under the tap and throwing it into the trash it appears in the door frame, full, glowing, looking right at me with its soft wings loosely spread. “Hello” I say and it sings again and I can do nothing but cry.
“It’s here” I tell Antoine and he tells me “Ok good. Did you call Damien?” “Yes I called him, maybe two weeks ago”. “And?” “And? What do you mean…um, yeah, he told me to feed it fruit”. “Ok good. And you did and now you need to call him again”. “Christ Antoine, this thing, I…I can’t fucking look at it….every time it’s like…fuck”. “Ok ok calm down. Call Damien right now ok?”. “Sure”. I call Damien of course and he tells me to wait, that it’s not the time yet and that he doesn’t know what he wants to do yet. I tell him “Great! What the fuck do I do in the meantime?” and he tells me to put handcuffs on it and I explain there are no hands anymore and he says “well lock it the fuck up somehow” and I say I will. I walk into the room and it is perched on my lounge and I gesture for it to move but it actually speaks now and says “you are a child of Yeshua” and I know what it is saying and I rush over to it but it moves so softly and quietly that I am crying again as if its movements sung to me and it says “Your soul wants love, not this” and it moves again, this time next to me and it lets me know it is okay for me to lock it in the basement so it follows me down and lets me close the door on it.
It is the morning and I open the door to the basement and bring Damien down with me and his eyes roll back and his fingers become like daggers and his voice, deeper than always tells me “is this the place Jeremy” and I am scared and say “yes” and he moves past me into the darkness and I scramble back up the stairs and turn on the lights and he is on the bird creature and they are struggling and its feathers are coming off and Damien’s claws are going into it but it looks like the white creature moving under him rises over him and it’s singing a soft song and now it has its feet on Damien’s neck and is standing over him and breaking his body into two pieces and when it is done it rushes up from the basement and past me and out through the front door and as it does it changes into something I have never seen and it disappears so fast, leaving me with a warmth I’ve never felt and the heat becomes hotter and hotter and in my chest I feel it hard until I can’t stand up anymore.