This poem is a little loud, so just warning you.
Those have been kind of, some of them, a little quieter.
"Antithetical Monologue."
"This isn't a stage upon which my dead and past relatives play
the parts of assholes and drunks, child molesters
and wife beaters, dragging themselves
through me like ghosts pass through people, steam
from a New York City sewer grate, the grass which refuses
to grow above some graves, their energy plagued
and plaguing me in intermittent moments where
my body and mind try to grasp our cleaved relationship.
This is the poem that begins and begins again where I drive them
from me like the demons I don't believe in,
weird marble frescoed half animal, half beasts,
stabbed with the arrows of avenging angels in Rome.
Those half humans always have their eyes rolled back
in a sort of pain or terror or death.
Medieval saints do, too, a collective response
to the presence of God.
There is no religious anguish, another sacrament as devotion
to Mary, and the promise of purity of soul
should have fed the starving of air,
the babes nourished on a new milk.
The milk was air.
The milk passed through their hands like an invisible smoke.
The purses and pockets of the rich, of Catholic priests
and government ministers weighed down
the air, so the air was empty, a belly of air.
My great grandparents and grandparents
exalted in their own perfect suffering,
their mortification of flesh, their terror
and pain and death, their heavy hands
on their children's backs, their heavy tears of salt,
their echoes and shadows tracking
around the corners of city buildings
and the glowing arcs of street lamps at night.
Their gibberish, their endless lament, their curses, and they
cursed, I'm alone.
They almost seem dead to me."