Tonight's Poet Corner: Rejected Eulogy

Rejected Eulogy
by Belinda Roddie

It's hard to stomach, isn't it? The
smell of car exhaust. The odor pulsing
like dying men's fingers, reaching out,
aching for honey on their lips, sweet sips
of nectar from gods who pretend they still care.
More like opium: The fumes curl and
dress you, turn the toxins into a new shirt,
something to wear at your memorial service.

Or the bottle of pills. Chalky, like school trauma.
The tablets are ground into fine powder by
your own mortar and pestle. Mix it
into your final nightcap. Write last goodbyes
before your hands grow shaky. Think
of love before you get too sleepy. Eyelids
have always held the weight of Atlas,
who holds the weight of the world with him.

Boulders shift colors and sizes when palmed
by sweaty palms. Burdens shift colors and
sizes when tied up in a bindle. You wander
into train stations, where you contort your
body into the shape of a wheel and hope that you
can travel at the speed of a bullet to a destination
that you've only read about in fairy tales.

The blade was too dull for you. The jump
from the bridge too high. Dip a pair
of fingers into the skyline, the street lamp.
The horizon tastes too sweet. You don't
believe in sunrises anymore, just sunsets.
Not even sunsets, just dusks. No dawns.

I did not give you permission to deny rising
at dawn. I did not give you permission to
slip into endless twilights, cusps, crickets
cooling their brains with their legs because
their music is the last thing you remember.

Please: I did not give you permission
to leave. I did not give you permission
to drown in your own dreams. I did not
give you permission to sneak out of
existence like slipping through the window
of your parents' basement: The afterlife

is not kind about you being out past curfew.
The obituary I wrote you is already stale. The
flavor of living has left the spirit of the hardtack.
I carry it still - hopeful, thinking your story
gives my own presence more digestibility. It's

all hard to stomach, isn't it? The black hole
that pulls your debris in and will never spit
it back out. It sits in the hovels of my gut,
yanking on the chains I've forged around
my lungs, to reinforce the ribs I may have
broken from all my screaming.

Because I can still hear the engine. And I can
still smell the oil. And I will still ignore
the little rainbows lit up in the garage,
glowing like garish ghosts from the puddle
that commiserated with you beneath your feet
when the window refused to roll back up.