Couch Mourner

I know there are people
who say that it's a sin
to stand there and watch death
pick the pockets of innocent passersby.
Some are so empty handed
that they keep their hands in their pockets
just so they can say they're holding tight to something,
some have their wills scribbled out on the back
of grocery receipts signed with the lifelines and flat lines
of their sloppy penmanship. Others keep loose change,
maybe to give to a wishing well or to a gutter. Doesn't matter which,
so long as someone stays alive today.

A dime killed someone today,
indirectly because you can't arm a dime
with blunt-object breathing
or bladed heartbeats.

Mary Mae was six, starting yesterday.
Her grandpa was in town. He had
an extraordinary gift for choosing
lucky numbers that lose and for forgetting birthdays,
but today there was a familiar face in the calendar.
On the way to the convenience store,
he called Mary Mae to his skeletal sedan
and slipped a shiny secret into her hand,
whispered something he rehearsed
at the stop sign, "Buy yourself something
sweet as you, Pumpkin. Happy Birthday."


Mary Mae didn't buy herself something sweet,
she liked the way the dime performed flips and dives
when she tossed it into the air, sleek and articulate as a dolphin.
She fell asleep on the couch with the dime at her feet.
She slept until noon. She slept until her parents
could stop crying all the time,
but they still couldn't forget like Grandpa.utopsy revealed nothing but no reason to be angry,
Sometimes coincidences arrive at bedsides as casually
as sandmen and tooth fairies

and they don't even leave their loose change
under the cold side of the pillow.

I know there are people
who tattoo themselves
with rose-filled skulls
and stars limping down
their arms like angel's breath,
but when it's time to leave,
they beg you to keep the lights on
just a little longer.
They want to see the day
that skull grows dusty beneath a heaving grave of wrinkles,
when all that's left of the roses
are their thorns protruding from dead eye sockets like cataracts.

Perhaps it would be easier to tell these people
that they don't they have to remind themselves
about death to want to keep living. There are
little boys in this world who save all their crying
from the pain of scraped knees like bread crumbs,
There are girls who carry wildflowers home
to their mothers with bee stings on their fingers
because there's nothing worth celebrating
but Mother's Day every day.
Daddy fell asleep at the end of the month
before he could tear dead December
from the calendar. Now everybody's shivering,
These thirty-one fresh days of January
don't recognize last year's thirty-one holiday snowmen.
Aurora Borealis sprawls into Valentine's Day;
This time Cupid is an orphan, his bow and arrow
pretending to be the womb, but now he can't find his birthplace.
A leap year like an extra limb. Perhaps this time he's a stillbirth.

Mary Mae got this far, five whole years
of tiptoeing on her own shadows.
She earned coal in her stocking just one yearut of those several, but it turned out to be candy
for good girls who sin sometimes.
She spent the summer tending to rosebushes
with her father, unafraid of snagging a thigh on the thorns.
The sight of blood was something worth crying about
until it stopped under the pressure of her fingertips
where she secretly smuggled her own pulse,
counting the throbs by ten. One day she would open
a lemonade stand and sell them for a dime each.
Donations, a rosy-cheeked word. Her mother taught her

to give

to hungry children,
to empty hands,
to wishing wells.

and she learned that they have things in common,
that they callous, they dry up, they die
when no one is around to sustain them.
All of this hurts. All of this is never as easy
as lying down and forgetting, but the pains
fall into exact places, the same elegies ache in the same joints.
The same days that forget birthdays forget funerals.