I was cut off from you, postmortem done - two bullet wounds - one lodged inside your throat silencing your song. The other bullet dug a ridge through your scalp, cracked your skull and froze your feet forever.
The sun was up very early in the morning. Funeral service was by ten am. By nine am, I was smoking a blunt by the hearse and asking the asphalt to let me die too. Someone kept grabbing my arm and whispering words in my ears. I kept nodding and nodding as If I understood. Two bullets in the air, two silences in the wind.
A cassock fluttered in the wind and some body tittered - it was me. My body was somnolent and I was a somnambulist that day - whatever that means. A tree was uprooted to make the grave. Some thing has to die for some body to die. I sat on an upturned root and watch dying leaves yellow in the sun. Two bullets, a sigh and a glottal stop. There were weevils in the beans we ate that night.
Your mother does not like me. You said she did - you lied. She kept asking me to hold her.
I want to weep like everybody else but my eyes are like concrete floors leaching sand into untamed buttocks. Six feet of soil, damp with rain, wet with tears, full with earthworms.
The sky grumbled. That beans was tasteless too.
Someone was shouting my name. I removed my hands from my balls and wiped the tree clean. The smell of old urine followed me like ghosts back to the car. It was tinted, the glasses. I could see my face, swollen with hunger for sleep and tears. I pulled the ring from my finger and stared at it. The sun licked it with yellow fire and your name appeared in the underside but a cloud shadowed the sun and you faded away again. I dropped it on the casket before the rain began to fall.
Some one hissed but my body was light like a balloon. I touched my lips with the tip of my tongue and my fingers then I touched the casket. It was warm in the tattooed sun that filtered dust through the tree leaves and the drizzle washing the mouth of the grave away. I poured wet humus on the casket - ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The human body is some percent water - water to earth. The sea always reaches the shore - always. I drink the coke filled with whiskey. I cover my eardrums with music and watch people's lips move.
I walk passed crumbling homes of old bones and I read epitaphs from loved ones long gone. One day, I'll forget your smell and the taste of your tears - one day. I rubbed my hands over gravestones and feel the fine rub of chipped stone and cement scrubbed off by the slow advance of time. An old tree root stretched a foot and I stumbled into a tree as lightning struck aforesaid tree and me.
I saw myself in two version - one white, one black then I lit up and began to burn. The smell of burnt hair filled my nose, then someone began to scream. I thought it was me but then it became a duet then a symphony of unrestrained beauty. I lost the thread of the song and darkness gave me a shroud which I took and covered my eyes. You never said death would be this beautiful. You always did tell your lies very well.
At the hospital, high as a baby eagle, pain a constant whisper in my head, I muttered my prayers to a God that I had forgotten for most of my life. My prayers were half crazed curses and full fledged pleas. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted to breathe. One breathy nurse kept fumbling with my bandages and rubbing her heaving breasts on the pain that was my face.
I was hungry. I would have eaten that beans and the weevils too. I laid there like a mummy at the beach. The news was horrible - I have lost the baldness that was my head. Someone was saying that we should plant my head with hairs. It is my body! I kept screaming but no one is heard me. It didn't matter anyway, I won't be her for long, I concluded. I would have loved a cigarette then or a blunt or a cup of whiskey on the tip of my tongue. I could not feel my toes.
Did the funeral go as planned? Did you get a decent burial? Your mother came and stared at me with her big eyes like tea cups. She said nothing. She just stared and stared as if I was some injured dog. She smelt of old clothes and camphor. Her hair was greying again. She slept in a chair by the window. I farted, she smiled. I farted, she frowned. She was always difficult to please.
I came to see you as soon as I was discharged. I was brought, i meant to say, on a wheelchair, with my very own breathy, breasty nurse. I didn't like her. She smiled too much. She had big lips and a long tongue. She wanted my soul. I wanted to be left alone. She made an awesome peppersoup but smelled like toilet soap and disinfectant all the time. No seduction, no romance, just plain ordinary labour. Who enjoys their job this much?
There was grass around the stone. I added a flower - a hibiscus flower. You used to love that flower. At least, it was the only plant you ever bothered to water. I had a pot of flower on the windowsill a well as some home grown cannabis. The nurse destroyed the cannabis anytime she got the chance but I was resilient and determined.
I tried to remember your face and it was not so hard. I thought I would have forgotten by now. I had your favourite perfume on, so i got to smell you around me all the time. When I get home, I told myself as I watched the ants pillaging your grave, i would try to get the nurse to tell me all her secrets. I poured a fruity wine for you and the earth. The ants were ecstatic. The nurse seized all my alcohol stash. I had one bottle - the last of them all hidden behind my bedside cupboard. I should not be denied my pleasures.
I saw a family in black, weeping and trembling before a fresh stone. They really did miss their loved one. Lots of flowers serenaded the grave. I pulled some weeds on ours, at least the easy ones. My jailer rolled me back to the car. A police car is packed beside the car. A detective stepped out of it and calmly informed me that I was under arrest for killing you. I could not laugh. My jaws were stiff with scar tissue. Police are damned slow. It took them a year to realise that I had pressed the trigger hard at you. You would have laughed if you were here but you are not and I really do miss you and the lies you used to tell.
This story started as a poem but it evolved along the way into this thing. It is somewhat introspective. There is no dialogue and the narrator's thoughts are merged with his narration. You can call it a simile of the stream of consciousness technique, if you like.
I still have two pending stories. I'll get on them soon enough. Good night
©warpedpoetic, 2019.