The next step [INAUDIBLE].
Oh, excuse me.
The next one is--
I went to a funeral of a boy who had
been killed by a blast, and--
I don't know where it is.
I think I know it.
All right.
OK.
And it's funny you being there, and then I
would call home and find out what I actually saw
and translate it to television back home
and what they chose to show.
And they showed a scene from this funeral,
and it was just a very sedate thing.
If you'd been there long enough, you
would see the mother totally lose control.
You know I hate to do this, but I
am going to try and find it because it's something
that I don't want to screw up, and you guys don't
want me to screw it up, right?
We don't want you to do it.
God.
Where are my E's?
Did somebody take my E's?
How anal is this?
I have this all like in plastic.
Well I think I could do it.
You guys be patient with me.
The gritty film that CNN will treasure
will show her this way.
A mother, her glazed and bulging eyes
locked in the shimmer that creeps
toward weeping, pudgy body eased into metronome,
the boom and click of her tight new dress shoes
giving the bored choir a texture to climb.
Thank God she's not a howler.
This will please the masses who clicked their remotes, perceive
her into their homes over dinners of sticky rice
and saucy chunks of meat.
Calmly boxed and neatly huge, she
is dignity byte, incapable of ruining the family
hour by baring her teeth and demanding what she has lost.
But here, propped sweaty in this tiny church,
we wheeze in the must of closeness and death,
swat away the gorged and sluggish flies
who gossip buzz, whisper in our skin with spindly legs,
dance wildly on the dead boy's nose.
He was 13, grace turning his back to the bomb
just before the blast.
Beneath the thin sheet that covers
the place where his legs should be
there is the rustle of nothing.
Damn those tattered gym shoes and loaded pants legs,
stuffed with paper and sticks.
But his torso is sweet memory, the fuel of mothers.
Ignore the singed eyebrow, the missing cheek.
The fly trapped in the tight nap of hair,
his mother's blistered focus.
Oh God.
I knew this was going to happen.
The doomed fly trapped in the tight crown of hair,
his mother's blistered focus.
As the casket is carried away by six boys in identical wingtip
shirts, the mother screams and buckles.
Her hands roar and flail.
Paperback bibles fly.
Her mouth opens broad, silence on--
Her mouth opens wide and soundless on raw teeth.
Head twisted until neck wails and she
is carried, a squirming X, a woman at
each man, a hand at each foot.
One dry breast popped loose, already a shoe gone.
Already a shoe gone, already a foot gone.
A leg.
Already a leg gone, two legs, a life.
Already her son gone.
The moon following.
Twice stuffing her whole heart with paper, paper and sticks.
I apologize, guys.