For the Day of the Dead
Shop windows are adorned
with papier-mâché skeletons,
some in cowboy hats, some with crowns,
Behind glass, slumped together,
they look like drunkards at the end
of a party.
Soon enough,
they’ll join the parade
with Catrinas bearing flowers
and blasting, bellowing,
mariachi bands.
Their showy heads,
ritualized out of all horror,
will jiggle on springs
as their loose limbs scuttle and prance.
These are not the dead
discovered suffocated
in a juiceless van in the desert.
Nor the dead riddled with
gangland bullets,
piled atop each other
in a ditch.
These aren’t the dead
who confront you,
face to skull,
and demand you join them.
They’re the friendly dead,
the amigo dead
as a guide explains to a tourist.
These are dead
assembled for joy and liberation.
They’re the dead you can cheer
from the sidewalk
as they dance to the song of life.
The War Front
There’s always war raging somewhere.
I don’t need the television,
the internet, to know.
It’s how people are.
Look at those kids fighting on the sidewalk.
And those two guys
giving each other the finger.
And the couple in the next room—
even lovers start to hate each other
once boredom gives the nod.
I can be depressed about it all
but I prefer to be philosophical.
Bombs, torture, death, misery.
That’s just my neighbours taken to extremes.
Maybe war would do us all a favour.
No more scrapping kids.
No car swerving into another’s lane.
Nobody called Louise that
some jerk was being too friendly with.
I won’t be the one saying
“How could this happen here?”
But I have my speech to war already prepared.
What kept you?
The One Flower
If I was not meant to be lonely,
there’d be a doorway into me,
clearly marked.
There is not.
I expect this to continue unto death.
Then, that doorway will appear,
but with a flashing sign above—
“Exit only.”
It’s a grey morning, early December.
Trees stand alone.
Oh, they convince themselves
that the mist that wends its way
from one to the next
is a join.
But, then again, they’re trees.
They have a long, long time
to maintain the lie.
I have a wife.
Love binds
but it doesn’t penetrate.
Her lips are warm,
her touch likewise.
But there’s no place to go
from there.
Death, love, solitude,
they come together
in a flower plucked
and slipped into a vase.
Beautiful? Cruel?
Impenetrable is my guess.
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image: joey zanotti
