Bone butter

I can't lose the cobwebs, the bone butter, the delicate scaffold, that marrow comb. I should talk to the dead, to this party I host. One after the other and another again. It's not that I'm sick of them, the persons of the dead, but I can barely see what's going on around me. Clouds of perfume and old shirts, buzzing voices with nothing new to say, never again. What did she say, she’s said it again, and yes I’m ready, I’m ready to go to Wong’s, already out the door and gone, I am, on and down the way. Can't shake the dead. I've had to accept that lately. Can't get away from them. A boat full of bones. Bones and flowers and pain-hazed eyes looming before me. Horse teeth and china blue eyes and thick hands slapping the table, the slap and the wonderful laughs.

It’s got nothing to do with my gray hairs, with my squinting, all the little deaths I feel inside me.

It’s the eyes bobbing in the coffee. Bloated tongues and gravelly oil pans, his spoon in the coffee, clinking clinking clinking. OCD and the smell of old nicotine on glass. Brown rivulets and helping your dad and the lung-stopping Windex in that small airless space, choking with sunlight. Popcorn and unpopped corns on the floor mats, the sweet reek of gasoline. My father.

But there's the one I don't talk about, and why should I? She shot herself. Sneaky ghost. The absence of sense and wondering what the bomb was, from what direction the revenge will come. You don't want to open a can of chili beans and see her face erupt. Spiritual botulinum. There was a time after she died, there was a time when I would be riding the bus and see a woman about five-five, auburnish hair between the shoulder blades, I would see a dress full of flesh-air and freeze. Holy fuck with the prickling singing and the ruptured cells and the tingling, the heart cast loose and wondering if it would ever be good for anything again, this seeing-a-woman-walking-down-the-street-while-riding-the-bus? Mostly you wonder, at least I did, if she had fucking pulled a prank. It’s been almost six years and I’m still wondering, still dread hair dyed a certain shade of red.

It's kind of silly. And annoying.