Cult of the Goat Laugh and How to Afford Death
- Cult of the Goat Laugh and How to Afford Death
Cult of the Goat Laugh
I've been sleeping in the bathroom with a professionalconcussion. Animals furlough the couch. It might be okay to consider oneself the governor of eulogies simply because horseflies like tiny planes become my pupils.Or because this is the season for shoulder accessories.Parrots, the thrift store colonel, memory of a lover's hand. I am trying to be less myself more often. Baby steps in baby socks around my ears. I place a quarterin the jukebox then remember it's 2019. I shakethe machine for a bottle of cola. What gives. There should be a religion devoted to the woman who fashions an old-fashioned milkshake off the sideof the highway in a diner even the good movies got wrong.My toupee is wearing me, gradually, down. I guess now it's time to say something important like I wasn't supposed to be born or born this way rather born again and hereI am worshipping godless deities due to fake cherriescaked on an apron. Call it a commercial for the invisible audience. A roadmap to the planet more Pluto than Pluto. Some afternoons are designed for throwing axes at deadtrees. Mother of Sacrifice, I give you my artifice, nowgive me your wedding dress. Spit for me in your off hand. [End Page 55]
How to Afford Death
First, purchase a plastic casket and ask of it only the questionsthat have no answer. Who are we? Where do we come from?Is it possible to slip the neighbor's dog a larynx-cinching pill?Then throw masking tape around everything small from balljoint to wilting boutonnière. Like your father in his Tuesdaybest donning that herringbone vest for the courthouse weddingthat lasted less than a month. Consider yourself bothpallbearer and preacher. Coroner and small undergroundcreature turning a history of bones into nourishing soil.Circle silver dollars over the eyes and repeat after me:there is a light lighter than light, a dark so heavy you can wear its mouth.Rehearse your eulogy in the hearse, just after you deliver it.Brush the confetti white hair of your mother in the passengerseat, unable to weep. If nothing else, shovel the horse of your teeththrough an apple and scream into its golden flesh. If the tongueis a liberty bell, ring it twice. Roll the dice and toss the whole urninto the sea. Leave nothing to the imagination of the whales' sad swallowing. [End Page 56]
Philip Schaefer's collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests and been published by Puritan, Meridian, and Passages North. His work has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and by The Poetry Society of America. He's gearing up to open a restaurant/bar in Missoula, Montana.
