Karaoke
YOU want to sing songs in the Christian choir—about a man you met with a rotten
chest and rotten heart you could smell before he spoke. But you are your shared
apartment’s resident howler. Sounds come out like cries no matter how you try to
articulate something intelligible. That man, his heart is putrid enough that decay-stink
leaks out his follicles (where hair should sprout, the slight whiff of cheesed death).
And you, sob-shackled thing, stand before the entire Christian choir and open your
mouth to reveal a black wet hole and perfect welfare teeth and an epiglottis
contracting and chucking out a wail from your own slick throat. The blonde-haired
Christians look on politely while you sing for them. The choral director makes a small
noise and asks if you want to start again. Pull and stretch them lips tight. Only widowgrief noises escape.
The choir don’t let you in so you don’t get to sing of Judas, all sweet-mouthed
and marble-eyed and fish-lipped. You wonder what could possibly have come first,
language or sorrow, because you have had no opportunities to mend brokenness; your
brokenness came fresh with you out of your mother’s red womb.
You run into each other often. First, you smell him: sharp and violent. When
he sees you, he shrugs a bit and looks away. You think he knows you’re onto him.
You hope he hides because he is afraid. You want someone else to feel fear, to fear
you: you the coward, you the non-Christian Christian-choir reject, you who fears
more than you say.
Once, you watched him steal from the altar. You see him there most, in the
echoey sanctuary that stays sparse on not-Sundays, on days when you pretend to seek
only God’s forgiveness and the clarity of repentance. It is at these times of feigned
vulnerability that your paths cross. Once, you watched him steal a candle from the
double-wide-coffin-wood altar. Your tired eyes met his blue ones and your nose
smelled Aryan death. He looked away.
Hearts broken become dead meat. Rot flesh. You try to sing this at your
Christian choir audition and your maw makes an “O” of not orgasm or surprise but
wailful pain. You clench your teeth to try again, but the choral director stops you to
save her pupils’ ears. Perhaps rotted hearts most need something sung to God for the
hearing. But God don’t hear you, so who you singing for?
Your teeth-lips-cheeks make creature sounds. Take that wasted tongue and
make it sing something sweet, songs of dead hearts inside live men.