Death Tells Me Jokes by ELJ Publications

Death Tells Me Jokes Poems By

John Mitchel

Disclaimer: Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For my enemies, friends, and family. Thanks for the hell and memories.

CONTENTS the lily in your clenched fist

your first breath was not a cry

the state of my life at 3:00 am

The Standoff

magic

mistake

to the roach at dawn

a quick sketch

the carnival is dead like the waves

white noise i

there are bills on the table and bottles on the floor

It’s All Very Literary

community

the emperor’s pub

Poem at Midnight for Death and an Empty Room

sleepless night titles are for songs

ash and wind and funeral nights

1940

Hiroshima, 1946

i won’t let it rain at your funeral

graffiti in the asylum

elegy

broken triolet on barewood floor

beta fish

alchemy mourning song clockwork white noise ii kingdoms in the walls another sleepless night but doctor I am pagliacci The Brick You Canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Spit Out snapshot 5 am

37 39 41 42 43 44 45 47 48 49

pain is meaningless and always unique

the lily in your clinched fist tell her there’s a messiah some place and he’s handcuffed to a park bench feeding pigeons from the tattered pockets of a stolen bathrobe. tell her atom bombs are stars if you’re standing far enough away tell her there’s a lily in your clinched fist and tell her the universe is the cheap analog wristwatch you wore on your arm when you were a child too stupid to tell time, but smiling all the same. tell her about your schizophrenic grandmother about the day she grabbed your palm and screamed among the hundreds of shoeboxes and the 15 tangled extension cords of her living room your spirit is restless and then quietly explained that’s why you dream about being awake. tell her about the black cat nobody bothered to name whose eyes were too small and his fangs too long and how he stole bagels from the toaster when your back was turned. tell her at night he’d curl up on the foot your bed and you’d sing to him before you both fell asleep. tell her how he would leap from the shed roof 4 sets of claws extended onto grace, the butterscotch german shepherd, to keep her from his food bowl. tell her how he was always injured and always limping and you saw him kill a small raccoon. 5

tell her about the day you were told to put him down. tell her he was 15 and you were 8 and it was a summer without rain and when you walked out onto the porch with the .20 gauge shotgun in your small tanned hands he hissed at you, bristled his matted fur, and he charged the 4:15 express train with a growl lost beneath its whistle. tell her as the train crushed his insignificant body your friends laughed, but you respect him because at least he knew what he wanted. tell her about high school gym class when the teacher stepped out for 15 minutes. tell her about the younger boy with an oak cross hanging from a hemp braid around his neck. tell her you were playing baseball and he asked for the bat and you put it in his hands. tell her he walked past the batterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s box and swung the bat into the back of josh, the schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only homosexual. tell her about watching josh fall to the floor and how the others laughed and some of them kicked him and one spit on him. tell her you stood there, you watched, and you did nothing. tell her the only thing that scared you was realizing you did not care.

your first breath was not a cry For Landry

beneath fluorescent flood lights bright as stolen halos you found yourself hauntingly, confusingly alive.

the state of my life at 3:00 am your promise is the razor I keep in a cedar box with an old photo of us charred in the housefire and found laying in snow and sunlight the pills are the cage filling my mouth with the taste of keys where shade may be found between the bars and crickets that chirp in my mind in sleepless nights Death tells me jokes sometimes I laugh

The Standoff she had eyes like a red rose dipped in orange liquid iron and a full laugh that startled people standing too close and I had eyes and a deep hate for her smile and her joy and her musings on Christian cable and her â&#x20AC;&#x153;Jesus loves you! Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gonna be a good one today! I just know it!â&#x20AC;? as I stumbled to the loading dock at 8:59 in the morning to see if she could feel something besides joy as she tried to make me smile

magic they were standing under the thin gray awning in front of the old restaurant on the corner with its orange neon sign unlit in a window that hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been washed in years the rain fell in shards like drops of broken crystal some found their way through the weak seams of their awning open your eyes he said and she did and she smiled he pushed an old piano with its cracked keys and its wood chipped like a memory from beneath the thin gray awning exposing the black and the ivory keys to rain that fell thick and hard as shot glasses she closed her eyes again and he took her hand as she listened to a million liquid fingers tap a song beneath the thin gray awning and they smiled as the notes spilled into the night like black volcanic sand falling onto white marble tile veined with old dreams and imperfections

mistake head on my chest with a voice wisped like ash and level as still water she said i love you i said nothing and watched the moment burn hot and fade like an overexposed photograph she said i love you i said nothing. nothing.

to the roach at dawn in the drain your panic is rhythm. your struggle an empty echo in the empty sink, your last cage. some say the universe our souls, crushed soda cans thrown from a window. who were you and who are you now? let your voice strain mourn with a hiss and iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll sing a whisper as i drown you.

a quick sketch the trainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s whistle tears at our dreams, screaming a hollow wail like a little paint thinner burbling in a rusted iron pot her eyes slip over the dark she smiles and she shines like cracked blue marbles my eyes are bleared half closed my sweat glistens like stale pus i groan and roll away from her everything's shadowed corpse gray like smoke in a bird cage

the carnival is dead like the waves the cruise ship anchor crushes the life boat and faces bob in the harbor like paper towel rolls as ghosts drift down the boardwalk listless and forgotten the carnival lights, broken colored glass crushed beneath the bootheel of a mortgage and barbed wire, the slow guillotine embrace as hope becomes memory the way dead men remember but no longer dream. accept that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the inevitable end

white noise i drifting receipts on a breeze or something pretty written in a match book cover a vinyl record shattering down oak stairs and moonlight through holes in an old slate roof the synapses fire the fingerprints stain the window glass like words unspoken in the dark

there are bills on the table and bottles on the floor the moon hangs itself without complaint as the night startles claps the senses like brass knuckles on a skeletal fist but grace is on my desk with her legs wide open

It’s All Very Literary somebody else has said it better but there are writers and there are manicured slouches demanding attention with pens and laptops sitting in rooms full of instruments not hearing the music staring into the night sky to look for satellites disguising their sermons as art as poems as literature as worthy they hate things they don’t understand and they understand very little in their deepest hell they could still see the neon green kiss of exit signs and didn’t tip the valets enough on the way out they’re the kind of “writers” who have never shoveled snow or ridden on a bus or talked to the guy in the line at the atm the kind of people who rough it with blue solo cups full of champagne and actually laugh at political cartoons people who make photo albums out of shopping trips 17