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Death of the Mighty Buttman 
after "Evening Noise at the
Funeral" by Bob DeGraaff
After a period of small victories, nails
and hair, the usual, I returned to dust,
as the stuttering priests predicted. It's just
so damned hot in here. I once welcomed heat.
Humidity, that was the stuff. Back in the day,
my breath flattened entire flowerbeds. It was
a powerful stink, the stuff of legends, known
throughout nine-and-twenty counties, ragged
children paying a nickel or a dime to scream
downwind. I disdained the pale impermanence
of sunbeams, swallowed rainbows, puppies,
guppies, shoes, bulked to sixteen feet and nine
across, with swollen purple nipples, the balls
of a Cossack and a gut like a goat. I was living
the good life. Then came Charon with his midnight
boating trips and barbecues of spareribs and corndogs
with relish, his women pale as onions and reeking
of gudgeon and riverside dirges, and finally, fatally,
the drunken bet. Oiled up tight with vaseline
and vodka, I dove into the Styx, muddy and sinking
like a continent. They fished me out and sliced me stem
to stern, stuffed my magnificent, swollen carcass into black
tails, passed the sweetmeats and pastries, fed my father
black coffee through the cheerful eulogy, and slammed
the round door shut. Now, outside the breathless stone
walls, a young woman reads a Latin-American novel. Men
replace faded cloth flags with fresh ones. Fragrant, edible
mushrooms cluster in the musty mausoleum shadow. And I lie
beveled and rigid in the drawer, my hairy shout torqued
into cryptic silence, corked like a lead pipe for posterity.
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