Allhallowtide

Sometimes I ask you,

as if you are here to ask,

Where did you go?

I am looking in a drawer that is still full of your stuff —

scraps of paper with phone numbers or notes or aphorisms, receipts, stuff that was yours —

and your absence once again throws me off kilter and into the terror of absolute loneliness, loss, and oblivion.

The Pit, Sheol.

I look at your unfinished painting I hung on the wall, so your beauty is always with me.

These are the days of the dead, late October, early November, when we visit the catacombs and look at the skeletons of loved ones.

These are the days when we make sugar images of that which we fear most and children put on masks and costumes of their fantasies of desire or terror,

and all of us enjoy the colors of death on the trees.

Are you in nature, in the sunset sky you stared at as you were so long in dying?

Almost as an infant stares at the world, you stared at the world you were leaving.

Did your breath really return to that which made it possible to begin with? To life universal? The breath of God?

I remember and I can never forget when your breathing stopped and your sister tapped me, she was taking your pulse and it stopped while I was kissing your forehead.

These are the days of the dead, and we tend to our shrines or tell ghost stories or watch the parable of Linus in the pumpkin patch.

Linus, who stopped the show to read from the gospel the meaning of Christmas, and then started his own cult, projecting his messiah upon a fat orange figure, and doesn’t Linus now become a symbol of the evangelicals who revere a hollow jack o’ lantern whose candle will one day sputter into the void? 

But today is not that day, 

because these are the days of the dead.

These are the days that grow shorter as the darkness spreads, and grow cold and frozen.

In weeks to come we will gather together to keep each other warm and to have our harvest feasts, and ask the Lord’s blessing, and light Advent candles, but now I am still looking for the gloves and caps and scarves, and it hasn’t started snowing, yet, but it will soon. 

You and I watched a movie where the living dead came out of their graves, following an inscrutable demand.

One day I will wake up from that nightmare

and turn off that horror movie, but not today, 

because these are the days of the dead.

Why did I dream of you last night?

Why were you so young and beautiful and dancing in the yard?

“The ghost is nothing but a stick with a sheet on it,”

you said.

You, who drank the darkness.

'ell if I know

We should be able to agree on facts, empirical facts, but if we cannot even agree that there is an elephant in the room, and that the elephant is shitting on the carpet, and eating all the food, and breaking things, and is feeling cramped in my apartment, into which he was not invited, and if the problem here is that YOU are the elephant, we’ll have to sedate you and remove you to some place out doors where you’ll feel comfortable and free-range, free from primate interference.

But when the elephant in the room says, “There is no elephant in the room,” he is speaking correctly, because he is in truth a rhinoceros.