ni un más día de los muertos

as you twist your fingers about the neck      
of the black vihuela      
sounding the chords of the cantata      
of dispossessing love      
as you begin the pale lamentations      
of the wake of childhood’s shrouding      
and wail again this world      
of imagined specters appearing as real      
as you bring forth this disconsolate music      
I feel my fatal senses recoil      
     
you sing of the graveyards      
dug in the rooms of your parents’ house      
of ungiven, stolen emblems      
remade into their lurid icons      
singing among the markers and monuments      
of Formica and cement      
they beckon you pick up      
the chorus they composed in you      
while instead you sing      
of bringing their dead      
to your fiesta of the unliving            
            
even as your siren melody turns beguilingly to me      
I am departing      
as your caressing verses would dig in their claws      
I am vanishing      
even as your sacrificial dance is displayed for me      
I am disappearing        
as your open legs call me to the coda of your pain        
I am gone          
as I spill myself into these indulgent anthems      
I have no existence      
            
I will not regale in the costumes      
of your carnival of self denigration      
nor wear these woven word serapes      
of bleached bones      
nor set tables among the tombs      
laid with spoils of the damned      
nor accompany  your sorrows      
to the echoes of the dead's applause      
and will not strap on a skull face      
so you may sing my beauty at the stage      
     
not one more day leading parades      
through memorials of bleak worship      
holding up corpses      
that you may have your guests      
walking in the rot      
as death verses chill your heart      
dancing los voladores      
among morbid broken stones      
not one day more  
the day of your dead      
ni un más día de los muertos      
     
you will remain in this tomb      
singing the comfort of its cold misery      
incant the long departed      
to sleeping and awakening with you      
I refuse to audience      
these mourning sonatas of stillborn life      
as I remain in sun’s warming light      
to find my place among the living      
to sing the holy hymns      
of desire and embracing      
I will be yours no more      
     
(with generous editorial support from Jade-Pandora)