Feather

Your body hung like a wet quarter note pinched from
Sheet music so white it matched the pasty color of your forehead
The day before your first born progeny found you
In the bass cleff den of your uplands apartment
Extension cord lassoed around your neck
Swaying in almost pendulum motion
Limp metronome, flaccid and lost

your son

screaming out of control on the bottom of the basement steps

Finding a note pinned to your chest in almost voodoo-doll fashion
An inky receipt culled from the past thirty years
Crumpled into a corsage of destitution
I remember in high school between church services
Hearing about how your father fished his fingers
inside your carebear underwear when
You were all of eleven while

the rest of the family was bowing their
heads in reverence to a faceless diety at the thanksgiving dinner table
And how you moved out the day you got your drivers license
With a pack of Winstons and a Metallica CD
Blaring the chorus of Master of Puppets
As you shifted unknown gears

The first time you shot heroin your
Eyes hushed closed like the lid
To an advent calendar popping in reverse
And you thought your belly button
Was the stub to a broken telephone wire reaching back
Into the conch of whispered time

and

How you lived your life like a feather shed
From an angel gang raped and battered
Bitched slapped by a bearded god the father
Clad in a white beatie drinking Miller hi-life
Dildo fucked by a flattened brim of her own halo
bleeding bible verses
All rise for the gospel
The victory of our god
cross shaped ladder
sans the assistance of a (wished-for) rung
A swan whose song still has yet to be sung