Sam Sax - Kaddish lyrics

An elegy in five sonnets (raises one finger) And just like that, the first boy I ever kissed is dead Dress lifted off a mannequin to reveal nothing Man who becomes just the empty space he's left I've arranged my pictures around the bathroom sink and shaved my face in the dark trying to make his shape appear now as he was then in my mirror The first boy i wanted who wanted me back Taught I was worth such a simple thought as hunger That lust could be a word used to describe my own saturnine skin What is dead can never rise from bread What is owed can never be repaid, instead this debt I'm too small to shoulder Maybe this is my hands' inheritance- to hold My grief, a pair of gloves I reach into space, trace the ghost waistband, hear his voice gasp from the dark (raises two fingers) You came in my mouth in a condom in a janitor's closet off my freshman dorm in college After, I exalted Christ as a joke "Christ," I said and you got small, said Jesus is your personal Lord and savior Just my luck, the first man i had in my mouth had the Lord in him Always a half-step from salvation, serotonin spliced with the divine, the barrier when it would have been better with none (raises three fingers) I could afford the flight to New York I could afford the time off work I could afford one night in a cheap motel I could meet a man on my small device there I could ask him to bring c**aine I could be cheap with the man there I could call him your name and he'd bear it I could break up a line and he'd become you But to sit in the long pew among your family To be judged how I'm loved in that company No, I think not, I could not bear it (raises four fingers) Please-tell me-how-I'm supposed to go on-knowing-you-are- (raises five fingers) The official cause of d**h according to the autopsy report is an overdose 'Dose', from the Greek- diodani, to give, to give over, to give too much, to overgive Veil in the skull lifting, flooding the brain with blood Cocaine comes from the leaves of the c**a plant, dried brittle and beaten with lime- same alkaline stuff used to quicken the decomposition of flesh Next, kerosene in a washing machine Next, stepped on so much it's almost a dance Next, stepped on so much it's almost a dance That Pantheon of chemicals and severed hands Of gunshot wounds and drug mules carrying plastic in their human stomachs He took all this inside him, who wouldn't break Him, paragon of opportunity Him, beauty, with potential that stretched out metal, and Pentecostal Blew rails till he was blue As a Eucharist: tachyarrythmia, cerebral hemorrhaging, hypothermia I wonder what they found when they cut him open Wings, I bet, I bet they found wings