PORIFERAN
for Shane

There, outlined in your long blue legs,

was the death ray of several shades.

I waited for you to go

so I could watch the colors change.

Didn’t visit hospitals

in fear of pastels.

I heard you promised

rain dances in throw-up cans.

Imploded cave-dweller eyes

with coalminer’s cough.

The rough in all the diamonds.

On your last day

I brought you my face,

hospitalized by your condition.

Role reversal of the docile.

Suicide bombers threw sweat beads,

you tasted them

wondering what made your

time-bomb lover tick.

At your funeral, you sat behind me

and coughed some more.

Unusually punctual

and still.

I watched from the 10^th pew as you

climbed inside everyone’s cranial

brown wooden boxes filled with

parts of them that had died with you.

Their parade spread two miles

of impotent, hollow halos.

They smelled the Earth’s bad breath

the day it opened to consume what was left of you

in a soft pink rose dress like a tongue

put to rest on the jawbone of death’s clench.

Their faces skipped heavy stone tears across

your stone-faced final placement.

“Mom always sounds like she’s laughing,”

You hissed from behind me.

“She is,” I whispered,

“That’s a cry held hostage by regret.”

At your funeral, your father

bit down on knuckles

that should have been used

to knock his teeth out.

I remember watching him

try to scale your emotional walls,

built after he confined you

to his kind of prison.

Yes, his maids would be lawyers.

His lawyers would be virgins.

His heart was a mini-bar with

an endless amount of reasons.

I could hear your breath shift

as you shook your head.

Intra-disassociation: you had become

your own crying shame.

I would resurrect your tailbone and serve him

your cop-out stand-offs in meaty proportions.

Your sadness gave clowns the hiccups.

My eyes filled with all your potential.

Our love was small, like airplane bathrooms

and really only good for one thing: relieving ourselves.

So, tell me, are you relieved?

Now that you never get to leave?