Rosemary

Bury me in rosemary
Let my last day be sweet

We’ve seen pig blood drained down gutters

We’ve seen chicken blood rust knives

We’ve seen the talking heads hide the news

We’ve seen cars burn in the street

We’ve seen pill bottles steal our friends

We’ve seen those crazy men wrapping rags on their feet

We’ve seen carbon and methane rip a hole in heaven’s floor so loud that we could hear the
silence from eternity

We’ve seen pictures and videos of dead kids on the beach and didn’t do anything about it
because the stacks of cash and ammunition were so much taller than our cardboard signs

We’ve seen elections rigged and didn’t do anything about it because we were too busy watching
YouTube and Twitter to understand how to use our rights

We’ve seen additives put into the water because somebody named Descartes thought to treat
homo sapiens like machines

We’ve seen lizards lose their tails over a child’s curiosity

We’ve seen frogs leave the swamps where people drill for oil

We’ve seen neo-bohemian-young-liberal-hippy-spiritual-children of the trees gentrifying the
neighborhoods of people just trying to make a buck

We’ve seen life and humanity and potential and history become the things that make up coffin
air

It smells of sex and spoiled milk
Crime and hungry people
Debt and buying stuff
Cancer and loving god
Sin and shame and vinegar broth and all the burdens gravestones won’t carry

Bury me in rosemary
Everything rots without a seed-don’t let them smell my blood ferment or see the time I spent
sipping rum on the street-passing bums and their empty soup cans
Trekking naked across strange women’s bedroom floors wondering what kind of animals are
honest-what color is their fur?
Hitchhiking drunk under the stars-stammering to work hungover-working for the man-spraying
Roundup into drainage ditch echo systems
Staying home for local elections-believing in the media-believing there is a little good in
everyone-believing a president wants to change anything
Never changing anything-never shelling out the dough for an artist’s product-bragging about sex
nobody enjoyed
Hurting my mother with unspoken habits she can see in the text messages I don’t return
Praying in spite of my best logic
Falling in love with brown-eyed girls faster than cathedral custodians can drain the candle wax

The girls and the government don’t care

May the rose stems keep their thorns for pricking the lovers’ toes strolling through imperial
gardens
Romance never really gave anybody drinking water
We will need the blood for the love potion cauldrons to pour down every new baby throat that
liquid song called “vow to celibacy and fuck the system!”-no fire can touch that river
We will burn the love letters and cremate the coal mines-the ash minerals will grow tomatoes for
the toddlers and their saltshakers shaped like Ameraucana roosters and hens with paint
that chipped after grandma passed away-corn and time killed her!-Daddy cried in tears
and Bible verses so often that his youngest child recites them at six a.m. on the Pacific
Islands with rum and the condoms in his pocket-looking at the sunrise and the ocean and
the dolphins and the god and he goes to sleep in a car named Nellie

Bury me in rosemary!
Let my last day be sweet

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Feathers

There were blue jay feathers caught in a chain link fence
When the empty stone church rang its bells
Where empty factory houses lined the streets

There were signs in the freshly cut lawns saying the houses were available for rent
The signs were covered in crow and dove feathers

Women kneeling in the alleys dug for worms with rusty tin cans
They were wrapped in blankets and their matted hair trapped rotting feathers from some past
spring
Some of the women folded hundred-dollar bills into the shapes of birds
Filthy toddlers soaked them in mud puddles ripping the paper

Gulls and robins perched on the dead powerlines
The church bells rang
The birds scattered to the tree line flapping away their feathers
Feathers covered the road
Sundays were the days for processionals

The church bells kept ringing and the women grabbed dirty children by their arms
They ran outside the neighborhood and hid in cheap tents
The man who owns things marched down the feathered road between the rows of houses
To the church
He wore a burlap gown down to his ankles

One-hundred headless men in blue jeans and white button-up shirts followed behind
They were in ranks like soldiers
They carried 5-gallon buckets full of bread and glass eyes

The women zipped the tent flaps and picked feathers out of the children’s dusty hair

The man who owns things lifted his gown and kneeled at the church steps
The hundred headless men pulled the bread out of their buckets
They laid the tithe bread at the church door

One-by-one, little yellow songbirds dotted the house gutters and street signs
Like stars in the aging dusk

The man who owns things left the way he came, parting the ranks of headless men
The processional turned and followed
Marching to the rattling song of glass eyes in their swinging buckets

(new stanza)

The children dozed under the hot tents sinking into their mothers’ laps and dreamt of massive bird
flocks flying to the other side of the world
In their dreams the feathers fell like January snowflakes

Finches and swallows crept out of the tree line
All the birds of Hitchcock’s Heaven held their breath
Thousands perched on every shiny perch

The processional disappeared over a hill

The birds swarmed the tithe bread
The birds pecked and tore and gorged themselves on the tithe bread
Until they bloated
Too heavy to fly

The children broke from their dreams
The children broke from the women’s arms and ran to the church steps
The children stepped over fattened birds
The children licked tithe breadcrumbs off the church steps

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