Things to Do When an Abuser Dies
by Koss
Hunt their bits on the internet and download their pics from when they were living dead and through you.
That box of pins from the dollar store is loaded.
Make a bastard collage out of ripped up them. Pin it to the corkboard and decide later. Or wipe your dog’s ass with it right now.
Burn it or don’t burn it. Curl up in a ball with it wadded in your fists. Be The Raging Baby. Cry or curse them.
Shit, you don’t have to wait ‘til they’re dead.
Say some hail Mary’s or don’t. Speak in tongues if that feels right. Take your head for a spin. Spew pea soup.
Admire your own easy grin.
Drown the photos in a fishbowl. No hurry ‘tho. You’ve your whole life, until you don’t.
Bless the golden fish, their flowing fins, and their black third eye that sees without judgment. They know what kindness is.
Ponder aloud how spouse, parents, friends cream all over legacy.com.
WTF is wrong with them?
Go out for a coffee in your car. A big seven-dollar latte. You can’t go in and wouldn’t want to. You vacuumed your car and threw out the trash yesterday, so it’s practically a goddamn limo.
Progress. It’s okay to celebrate. Or just feel what you feel. Nobody’s watching. You’re alone.
God is on vacation today. All of them. They do that, you’ve noticed.
Watch the rain bead up on your half-assed waxed window as the gray sky slinks away from the green slow globe—the globe and the glass and the thing that howls.
Turn on the radio, then immediately turn it off. Music just jitters the grief up from your bowels.
Maybe that’s okay. Put in your favorite CD. That CCR guy with the nasal voice. He’ll croon your demons out.
Eat French fries, which you never do.
Marvel at the nearly yellow splattered by red, a fast-food massacre of sorts.
You didn’t need the salt anyway. Something’s always missing. Health decisions gone red.
This could be a productive day. Did the world just get safer or is this just another blip in the terrene?
You’ll stay in your car instead.
There was more than one of them and more than one dead.
When you get home, you might even do an obituary search for fun or just discomfort. Count the creeps to sleep.
Remember where the gods are not.
Fuck it, you never confronted them! Too late. The way karma drifts from your grip.
You’ll just have to level the score in the next world.
Today’s dead was so nice, not intentionally cruel, just fucked up. Oh, but the damage they wreaked.
No stations to arrive at, even as the clock stops, you can’t drop anchor on the right side of things. Neither could they.
Lesson to tuck in your skanky hat: it bleeds and weeps no matter the intention, sadistic or stupid, a gash is a gash.
Let your skin untwist from its binding into new air. Slough off the musky wraps. They were never yours. Let the stench weep from your pores.
Invert the sun into your alien eyes as everything goes orange.
Feel your lungs contract. Exhale the swarms of bees and let your blood rush through the wires.
Who or how many are better off?
Just let the body moil in this lightsome world. It was nearly driven from itself.
(One is a [whole] number. So is one less. Or two.)
Koss is a writer and artist with over 150 publications in many journals including Diode Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, Rogue Agent, Bending Genres, Five Points, and others. They won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Award and were nominated for BOTN for poetry and fiction (by Kissing Dynamite and Bending Genres). Find links to recent publications at https://koss-works.com.