"Tarot Card of the Dreaming Man, Face Down"

Click here to listen to Mark Conway read this poem.


Then it was gone, the beatitude
of your body,
*********while the rest lay
******specifically there,
black, black, blue, heavy
as a dead dog, the back
of your legs
*********looking plastic, looking extra, trailing
***behind the rest of you
like a mooch, like a goddamn moron and you
barely there,
****already caravaggioing your way
through the light
*********and dark, mouthing the prime numbers
**of eternity …

We gave you days to continue dying
**and you did
**after you were dead. We
needed time: poor relations
to arrive; to decide upon
the precise symbolism
of the flowers; to complete
the box; nail it into
position; to divest the body
of its slime; to call
your name three times;
to call you three times;
to call you by name three times.

And at first.
You wouldn't go.
***You own this body
***somehow
***thriving within the caucus
***of microscopic insects and dazzled
***acids there to burn you down to ashes
***you over there, you
in your over-there work-body
of the soul, your hooded
spirit released and humming
*********like it's crazy in the light.

Where you are, slipping
**through the monstrous
inner membrane of the world,
you see how it works.
I, like a mooch, like a goddamn moron, live.

We waited for you. Two or three days.
Then an old man came and prayed.

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