My mother’s stepfather, who collected cardboard boxes and sometimes cans and sometimes bottles, you’re all gone and dried up now, beneath the dirt, skin-burned and body-buried, I think. You went too fast and the all-consuming hell-fire, that raging energy all stowed away, unused, in your chest, flared up… Columbia fell to pieces in the atmosphere as the heroin set your head back heavy against a dumpster in an alley.
I’ve gone dark-side planetary for you. I steam my best shirts at the dry cleaners down the street for you. These funerals of yours sing me to sleep with their whole-wholesome death melodies. You are the light of the world, says the meteor hurdling towards the earth. Bruce Willis would be proud of our desperate Armageddon rock opera, you would say.
I’ll take Dilaudid or Demerol, depending on the decade, you would say to the nurse, as if she could open a wormhole, or bend space and time to your will, to satiate your body’s relentless cravings.
When I saw The Challenger say goodnight, I was reminded of your smile, grandfather. I conjure you here and now with my blood and love and scientific blasphemies.
I am a space magician bleeding the lyrics to your neon love song, the one you wrote in your ecstatic dream cycles—your face spilling drool on the sidewalk.
I am praying, Please come back to me, over Bruce Lee’s grave with a bag full of Norco, Percocet, Palladone—prepared to sacrifice what I can.
I pictured you in the flames of a car-crash-pyre when I heard for the first time that Voyager 1 had made interstellar love to a cosmic light source.
I was watching A New Hope when I swore on my life that you would come back from the dead for me.
In a pile of boxes, under a freeway overpass in LA, off Alvarado if I remember correctly, I saw you, much later in time. Still alive. Still gasping and striving. I dreamed of you on Pluto, climbing mountains, eating freeze-dried ice cream with extraterrestrials, resting sweet eternal in your hyper sleep dreams. But instead, I saw you twisted, murky, as a melting picture, in the street’s fading lights and sound waves. There you were screaming, screaming, screaming always. I watched you erupt on the surface from aches deep in your bones, like a chemical absence was eating your marrow molecule by molecule…
I’m conjuring you here and now. And you appear an apparition, a life-stealing specter.
I’ve lived and I’ve died, you say to me.
I cannot live again.
On my hometown’s motor speedway, I send you these cars, each as a bullet. Bruce Springsteen is playing on the tape deck, and I am driving directly above you, sending you love to the rhythm of every moving tire. I am a blaspheming magician, writing secret supersonic notes to you on the fringes of our chromosomes, in the membrane of every cell, on the backs of my hands.
Charles L. Crowley lives in Pasadena, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dirty Chai Mag, Gravel Mag, Danse Macabre, Pidgeonholes, Unbroken Journal, and more. Aside from writing, he enjoys chasing chickens, raising roosters, watching Godzilla films, and consuming coffee and comic books.