the hay shirt I was fitted for long, too long, ago,
Scaredy-crow. Let my drafts of auto-death-prose
go. Let them fail to decompose. Let them heart-harden
to papier-mâché. Let me trip on this mummy on a grey
gentile holiday, nutcrack it open to find inside
burnt kernels of you. Those are for the chemists
to investigate while I open, close, open, close
the blinds like you used to do. Let me pretend
to live inside your old, jammed viewfinder.
I wrote your obituary ahead of time.
Do you remember my catatonic fall? Sundays
were the scoop-shop outing for I the infirm.
Mom and I talked about loving Annie Hall.
(The thought that she’d seen it was uncanny.
As the Moon Mist melted, it sunk in.
She meant Annie.) It’s a hard knock life
not wanting to be part of any club
that would have you as a member.
*In someone’s obit I have asterisked this
as the ideal time at which I would have been told
I’m Jewish. But tricky us, we wait
for tomorrow, tomorrow, transplendent
tomorrow. The Kafkaesque is only a day
away… I wrote an obit on the back
of a collage of Keith’s labels held together
with holy water and melted butter,
even if some things just don’t mix. The lobster’s
already dead behind the fridge, hollow shell
lack-blue. Are you empty too, your liver
flown the coop, your heart martyred off
into a collection plate, or split in two,
then two, then two? No? I’ll wait. Premature
obits have no expiration date. You’re not
a celebrity but I don’t want to write in haste.
Do you ever wonder what a person would
act like who was literally full of grace?
My church is high-camp pleasure and low-
grade pain. When I’m laid at last, chain
my brain to the gates of the Home for the Godless
Insane. Stitch me a yellow star out of alternating
rosary and anal beads. This plan has just one hitch:
Our niche is failing to fit and we try to be
too legit for the genre of pre-pre-writ obit.
We’s the B’ys
I’s the b’y that builds the boat
And I’s the b’y that sails her
I’s the b’y that catches the fish
And brings them home to Liza.
– “I’s the B’y,” a Newfoundland folk song
I.
I’s the b’y who’s a secret Jew
and I’s the b’y who wore an xxs yarmulke.
I’s the b’y who Dad carried on his shoulders
at the beach, and whose face, framed,
hung on his boarding-room wall.
I’s the b’y who was retrieved one day.
I’s the b’y who’s back with his mother
and new scum stepdad. I’s the b’y
fed ketchup sandwiches and knuckle blood,
and the worst part is that I love her.
I’s a b’y who you might call a straight white man
I’s a b’y whose mother tried to crack a rock
over my head at ten because I was fat.
I’s a b’y who left at seventeen
when a beating took my high-pitched hearing,
and then dropped out of high school
’cause there was no bus there from my sister’s.
I’s the b’y who doesn’t know why I get so tan
in the summer that customers call me mulatto.
I’s the b’y flummoxed my frizzy coif wouldn’t
fall flat into hip, long locks in the seventies.
I’s the b’y who was born a few years
after the Holocaust and who never knew
that I didn’t know why I’m this, and this,
and this. I’s the b’y who gave an old bastard
cpr at my post office job today
and I’s the b’y who couldn’t save him.
I’s the b’y you’d see as a false-consciousness
idiot who doesn’t understand my own
experience because I’m too busy attaining
the crass capital required to buy blood
pudding and potatoes, as if your fucking
hummus
