case of the punks
Thursday, May 20
Funerals are for the Living
I would rather not go to the funeral.
I do not want to wear a dress.
And I would rather not gather around the rectangular hole in the ground,
standing there among strangers' faces I've never seen before.
I do not want to see the celibate priest
speaking from uninspired verse
with his Bible-this and Bible-that.
I don't really care
for the black ties and solemn eyes.
I don't want to hold hands
and pretend in black.
I don't want to be introduced to people I've never seen before or talk about what a great man he was.
I don't want to witness all the running mascara and soiled tissue, besmirched with the dumps.
And I don't want to feign a tear for the man going underground.
And that means my father will be there. He will stand next to me, I'm sure. He will try to pretend like nothing has changed in the family since the beginning of May. He will use his height and his dark eyes again to deter away from what has been going on. He will preclude any chance of bringing up his Swinehood of adultery against my mother. He will, and I do not want to see him in his lowering charade. I hate to see him dress the part of the funeral, when he wears a white-starched shirt and black suit. He becomes The Embellishment - the epitome of all that he is... a phony. He is some pretended father, some pretended pillar of importance. He is the soft soap. I do not want to see him. I do not want him to stand next to me at the service. He will try to hold my hand and wrap his illusive arms around me, and such movements will scour the image of who he really is. All the mourners will think him a good man, comforting, sensitive, honest, and tall. I will know the truth, though - that he is a sophist. And my stomache will turn in disgust that I have become such a pawn of amenity for a hurtful man. I will become sick and cold. I will become unnerved. I will drift off into a daydream and push him down into the rectangular deep, kick some dirt over his sorry eyes, and fail to throw him a rose.
I am not going to speak at the mass... against my mother's wishes. What would my memory be? I shouldn't have to ask. I wasn't that close to my grandfather. I only knew a few things about him. We didn't talk much. Anything I might say about him would have to be dug up from some minor memory and then decorated with plastic beads My speech would be trite and of pretense. And that is just not like me. I am not like the funeral. The funeral and I, we are not capable of synthesis. I cannot merge with the funeral. The funeral makes no sense to me at all. The funeral is like running the clock backwards.
The funeral is a mistake.
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