Lamentation

O God, ah petition Thee! Hear mah cry and make haste mah respite, for ah am tired of this day and its most earnest work. Gather up thy servant and bring me home. Lord, there is no place upon this ground of men for me. Ah have seen complete the matter of thy command. It is done. She is shut down.

Three crows circle overhead! Ah am coming, Lord! Ah am coming! For the door to Thy kingdom lies not at mah head but at mah heel. Call me unner! Let this mire shut its mouth upon me! Prepareth Thee mah way! O God, hear mah prayer. Call me unner and deliver me from bloody men!

You would think that being born dumb – stricken of tongue and bereft of the faculty of exchange – would’ve sufficed. You would think that the burdens of mutehood would weigh heavily enough upon the head of a child. O no! Whoever was dealing out the bum breaks, whoever was spooning out the woe, must’ve seen me and up-ended the whole fucken can because ah was dripping in the stuff – hard luck and ill fortune. And an ill wind blew every day and every night shone forth an evil star and a day didn’t roll past that ah wasn’t catching some kind of crap.

Born a mute, and no speak, a speech shy freak aside the corpse of mah brother, in a puddle of peel liqueur, in the back of a burnt-out wreck,

atop of a hill of garbage—that was only the opening hand, a mere whiff of what destiny held in store for me. What maybe ah didn't know and mah dead brother did, was that we were born of Ma—and that made us two very sorry sprogs indeed. One dumb and one good-as-dead, the sickly issue of truly squalid loins—unsightly

urchins cast from her slum-womb into a wicked, wicked world, a world too cruel for such ill-

begotten mites as we.

O sure, the workers of the fields did hammer me down and those from the town chased me

away and in the schools the children pelted me with stones and those at the mill kicked me and

kicked me, but ah did brave all of the blows that rained down upon me. Indeed, these afflictions

paled to insignificance when set against the unending outrage suffered within the bounds of mah home. Yes! A most vile enemy was there within! O Mama was mah true and most unspeakable foe. She was black spit. It was not the valley folk but the drunken despotic hell-hog who spawned me that really put to the test mah mettle. Her later years, ah swear, were spent in the relentless pursuit of mah misery. Just to think about it, even now, two full years since her popping off, is enough to chill mah chitterlings.

It sometimes baffles me, you know, as Staff-bearer and Rod-raiser to the Lord, chosen to

unnertake His most ecstatic mission, how the Almighty in all His goodness and grace could conceive such an abomination as she. Or was this vixen built by another, more terrible hand? Was she the monsterpiece of some hellish cosmetician? A limb of Lucifer? Which bloody dungeons did they plumb? Which fucken sewer did they drag? Do you know?