Emperor

I was eighteen. The Garden State Parkway.
The police car in the bushes of the meridian,
its red light bar like an eyelid suddenly
opening, six eyes flashing about wildly,
looking for me.

"It's an ambush," I thought.
Me, who had my whole empire
in control - even the hairs on my head
were soldiers standing in order, helping me conquer
what I thought I had to own.

I was eighteen. The gas pedal was like all
physical things, destined to fall downward.
And now I confess
I don't remember anything
about the ticket - its cost or the cop

whose hand wrote my birth name
in the tiny squares, incorporating
my identity into the system.
In years I'd know he was just
doing what he had to do - as was I.

"Here's your ticket," he said,
as if he were an usher
whose job was to rip things in half.
"What am I entering?" I thought.
So my empire began to fall on a shoulder

of the Garden State Parkway-
not usurped really, but undermined.
I was eighteen and falling
through society's turnstiles-
college, speed limits, combing my hair

into a daily unnoticeable-
a work of art whose strength
was that it didn't particularly stand out,
like driving well. I drove off,
pushing the accelerator pedal

to the exact angle of, say,
the Tower of Pisa.
How I wanted to topple it.
How it became the only thing in my world
that could ever rise back.

First appeared in Kimera



Gravedigger's Birthday

We had only dated for three weeks
but there I was, burying her cat.
To top things off, it was my birthday,
but I knew the cat's death trumped it
so into the ground I went,
never having dug a grave before
but knowing I should know how.
Such an ancient, simple action,
as if our bodies evolved to do such work -
opposable thumb to dig and dig
deeper into the earth, and standing erect
to toss soil from our graves. I remembered
something from somewhere - boy scouts
or horror movie - delve deep enough
so raccoons can't stir up the corpse.
I did it all quietly with a sudden solemnity
not for the cat - I barely knew it -
but for the motion, the first ancestral thing
I had done in years, aware this was traffic
with old gods. The indifferent stars pinned
the lips of the grave open, and I lifted up
that solid eggplant of a body, and lowered her
carefully into the soil, as if the cat could feel it,
or th earth could. Ridiculous.
Then I lifted up that shovel, again
knowing what to do - load upon load
into the earth, back onto that body,
returning it but also casting it out
of my modern life where I would soon take
the short walk from the grave to the house,
eat some meat without thinking
of eating the meat, get in bed
next to my new, warm, mourning girlfriend
on a mattress imported from far away, some speck
of the grave's dirt rising behind a fingernail
as I lie awake, the faint next click
of my life's odometer there in the darkness,
living and dying at the same time,
thinking how so much motion and instinct
lies inert in the earth next to the swingset,
and how the ground's new toothless mouth
settled into closure without pomp,
temporary and permanent at once.

First appeared in Kimera