Open Mouth Requiem Poem by Jamaal May

In the open mouths of our many graves
are the mouths of our many friends,
open with the endless smiling
only skeletons can endure.

The dead find everything funny.
The living find everything dying
to be more alive than a phonograph
amplifier dropped into a bathtub.

A saying I can't forget goes something like:
tied to a chair, sent up in flames,
the rope was destroyed before the fire
convincingly claimed your cousin

belonged in its careful arms.
As the saying goes: third degree burns
across ninety percent of his taut frame
couldn't claim his voice

before someone had endured its muttering,
having found him and placed him in a bathtub,
unsure of what one does with a dead man
who has yet to get around to dying.

Again, someone whispers something terrible
in the ear of a husband. Another morning
fills a phone receiver with an empty voice,
How do we keep all the boxes closed?

Many mouths open and close
around so many children with tiny fists
for eyes, no one can not remember how greedy
the land is. How it calls us all back, spoiled
by the ease at which we always come.