Deathbed V
Her “soul” abed with “regret”…
(Both demanding quotation marks)…
Was, over the last week and a half,
Like that two-headed dog
Locked inside a car with the windows rolled up.
(One head spoke psalms and ceaselessly barked…
While the other slowly whimpered recognition
That no angels or mailmen would come.)
It’s only just now escaped … an eel of blue smoke
From the incision between her breasts.
A few months ago, her soul,
(Normally a lost six-fingered glove…)
Briefly hung like a philodendron
Above our bed at home at the spicy mention
Of anal sex, to which she would say the usual:
“It’s something to keep the circus train rolling.”
Though at the same time…
Her fingers mimed spiders crawling
Over a sleeping face…
Not what I’d come to expect
Gesticulation-wise.
I’d expected that stray workaday cartoon boulder…
(Her fingers tumbling over and over)…
Smashing into an imagined mountain orphanage…
Killing 33…but saving our marriage.
(A tiny detail…maybe…
But that’s how I loved her…
In aching increments…never completely.)
Last year at the mall, her soul was lime green
When photographed at the spectral camera booth…
Goddamn the creepy hippie shutterbug
That grabbed her ass as he leaned over
To show her the “violent swoosh of citrus”
Coming from the top of her head…
The “St. Elmo’s fire” bursting from her armpits…
Her fingertips…”a wizard’s wish .”
She went back 3 times…(black, hot pink, and aquamarine.)
When we first met, her soul
Consisted of a miniature shamrock tattoo blazing
Above her crotch. Her body was the end-all…
Her hair a cliché of corn silk …
Pasted by sleep and sweat to her neck…
Her nipples like small red thumbs…
Her raccoon nose, her handlebar collarbones…
Her cracked crooked lips, her navel deep as a shipwreck…
(One could go on and on with a catalog of secret fiefdoms)…
But now in this hospital room, being alone with the body…
Except for a baby in a crib, that came from the body…
(A tiny body squirming and squirting…
Clawing at the light with larval hands…
Its large watery eyes the color of dried blood)…
Myself a body disgusted with bodies…
I am hoping her soul makes a weather around us…
Not a frog storm…just the slightest breeze…
As I cannot swallow, I cannot breathe…
Perhaps a house-shaped fog…
(As Mother wants her basement back)…
Maybe lightning…maybe more…
Phillip Lee Duncan was born in Salisbury, Maryland, on November 4, 1967, and died in Denver, Colorado on January 7, 2012. A prolific and gifted artist in any medium he worked in, he was the writer and director of the German/English film Liebsesliender fur Untermenschen (Love Songs for Scumbags), as well as many shorts. His artwork has been exhibited in the US and abroad, and his collection of poetry, The Hospice Orgy, is forthcoming from Vulgar Marsala Press.