Death Is a Hysterical Dynasty

Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations, sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum carcass I'd found collapsed against the house. Forensics tells us the backyard is Panama before quinine, an ecosystem unto itself, civil war of mongoose, snake, and cat. The cause of the possum's death was obvious, this near-biblical dryness that lasted the summer. This morning I found a carapace, a palmetto bug in my shower, dead in his search for water. He got flushed, a Viking funeral; minutes later I heard about Rocky, 48, complications from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, who went the same week as John, 47, though by less violent means. I'd never introduced either to my family, and now I am covering the mirrors. Pictures from a decade ago exist without context, the bars in them closed, marriages shattered on the pebbly coast of installment debt, bands broken up by midnight arguments dead men can't recall. Forgive us our trespasses, yes, but also this literalism. Let us frame the only surviving picture of the three of us in a rectangle of thorns before we take communion out in the street. I will let those candles burn, burn, burn, burn, burn to the wick, Barracuda, then tell you how I would have laid down my life for either of those two men, and I have nothing to offer now they have done that for me.