Melancholia

I had seen the funeral in my mind:

laid in wait in coffin, awake for hours,

to be buried still alive. I told them

to bury me naked with my loves

all at my side, then awoke again too late

in the funeral of my life,

not naked, and with no one in my sight.

This is all wrong-

I’d already said good-bye. I told them

drain the abscesses, cut my nails,

close my eyes, catch them running in the streets,

crack their skulls, gouge their eyes,

bind together their hands and feet, then

dress them up to my delight-

I’d seen it all in the visions I had in life.

And at the funeral, know that we’ve rehearsed

the slow march down the village to the church,

where I’d cropped three sunflowers for fifty cents,

where someone was married once.

But that was then, this is now-

there is time to die, but no time to dance-

and already rotting in the knees,

unimmune to the moisture of the earth.

I saw it all from my dense and watchful sleep:

saw the progression climb into the tomb

from on the streets, but they were not carrying me.

I told them to strip the coffin of all padding,

patch the craniums with sprays of flowers

-three for fifty cents- empty the bowels,

let the loves come willingly,

and then huddle together in the greenish

moss that springs from me. It is the winter.

By the summer I will be free.