carrion humanity
—Wayne Koestenbaum
Have I inadvertently rewritten humanity
for humility? This was pages previous.
Such outrageous grievances that forge
within us each a growing ball of rubber
bands with ongoing and varying tensions.
To further grip my entirety, a rod the size
of a pencil that’s made its way to the
sharpener but once or twice, is stuck,
horizontal to the ground, having been
thrust fully into until wholly beneath the
skin just beneath the nape of my neck.
“It feels as if I’m being primed for wall
treatment.” Hung like a gory, baroque
painting, meanwhile, at the local museum.
It’s a tomb of some renown in which a
conveyor topped to maximum capacity
with fleshy gawkers of celebrity are
moved through tomb-like galleries
at only the speed that maximizes
capacity from entrance to exit,
where each body collapses. The
bodies sit until dusk, when they
are bulldozed, loaded into dump
trucks and driven to one of at
least a half a dozen garbage
heaps that rise in evenly inter
spersed locations in the
distance, half a mile past
city limits.
