EMPTY GRAVEYARDS

The Grim Reaper’s forte scalloped like a nude Knight
begging for a shinier physique—medallion of Death’s shibboleth, 
like gangs of chimeras on motorcycles riding into the sunset 

with tracheas of hissing vulgarity; escapologists of untongued 
vignettes aflame lurk now afar because all of the graveyards 
have burst open with Life! Fireballs, footplates,

uncovered dreams slashed like a bleach-light erupting 
like sundials through the former long-faced clamouring 
& melancholial plectrum of heavyweighted death. I walk 

along the bleeders, smoothing the freshness of my footsteps. 
I feel like spitting voltages. I feel like an ethereal statue 
in some rotunda about to lift off in greasy air blemishes, 

examined by wooers of the wind, the backside of the moon
(the uncommon name of the naked) accelerated, undoing 
Death’s relevance, gravity escapee. Its vexed legs

like pantomimes cobbled together; their white faces conjoined
in a blurred spinning turbine . . . Like tonight, where 
hormonal zombies walkabout like sophistries 

that I correspond with, noting the dampening graveyard’s 
suddenly sunny opened tonsils of worry, like hornets at funerals, 
proud with anonymity. I stand in the rainy cemetery 

with my grandmother, photographing her shadow 
upon grave-markers. The Nightmare, that Sorcerer of Silence
observes us from behind a tattered fence of fungal monsoons.

I’m untethered at the end of every dark tunnel, giving off light. 
Along the cratered data blows flurries of everyone’s peripheral,
receptive minerals. Death is obsolete. The last charade. 

The autopsy reveals respectful slowness, casual gaze of 
the fore-particles of my illumination, like a gaseous enema
in the Reaper’s permanent wound. Checkmate.