The Afterlife Is Having a Flea Market
He Comes With a Lynchian Flashlight
“We’re like lightbulbs. If bliss starts growing inside you, it’s like a light; it affects the environment.” – David Lynch
When the flea market locks its doors on Zion Road,
the locals rock on porches wrapped around by moonlight.
Straight through midnight he floateth down perennial
on a two-lane in black patent tapshoes unscuffed by traction.
Straight from the level of Eternal Phenomenal
he learned from Florentine Christmas card angels,
from the final decision of far gone untangled
future thought patterns the messenger angel
flies from the great director in an antique jacket
of black brocade. It spells The Almighty Remarkable
across his back embroidered in curlicued
letters like Elvis’s latter-day sparkle.
He brings an annual and promo greeting only
to those on the list from Zion Road the chosen
who filled out in fountain pen the questionnaire
Are You Saved from a neighbor a lover of sparrows
who was finally strangled for asking.
Every summer he saileth down and tasteth the precious
stones of the Revelation in his beloved’s garden:
The jasper sapphire chalcedony
emerald sardonyx that bloodlike savor
the sardius chrysolite beryl gain favor
topaz chrysopraysus earn his whispery praises
the jacinth and amethyst swallowed in phases.
His earthbound sweetheart strokes her balcony
as the pink floribunda roses climb the lattice.
She offers up the sacred and the stolen
glass tumbler wrapped in motel parchment
that is watermarked S A N I T I Z E D.
His own tongue recalls the ecstatic
whiff of earthly water chlorinized.
He removes the epidermal crackle vegetal
pale as John the Baptist’s hollow locust shell.
Beneath his single Everbrite beam
he deciphers the message on the paperskin
that protects the nearly immaculate conception,
the message only visible to him: Hello people
with brains channeled like underground rivers
as you search eternal aisles with no direction
to find the little batteries to place inside
your own heads so you won’t always be lost
somewhere in the hardware section.
Green Lamp Ghost
Beside the Vaseline globe a likewise emerald
face a ghost relaxes his salt-and-pepper head
bends as he reads from the green-stamp light.
I cannot tell the other flea marketers.
They’d never haunt a living room with it
although I’m sure he will not reappear.
How do I know? It might be hard to tell
but first of all, I will be looking now.
If he isn’t there, I will imagine him
and imagining a ghost is never right.
They have to come before suspicion peaks,
traveling faster than wave or particle
and if you try and pull them out of air
they will be gone before they ever come.
The Message of the Lost Handle
“the only thing good is the world’s smallest man
who happened to be a personal friend of mine” – Frank Stanford
I have set up my vagabond stage in the blue gravel
parking lot at the flea market on Zion Road.
As the daughter of the world’s smallest man
I climb on spider gauze I spin into heaven.
My true believers cry upward and they sigh
Oh the futility for what the angels might give me.
I have climbed up through the wispy
to reach at last a big round silver thing
and receive the miracle gift from Gabriel’s hands.
Sliding back down to my acolytes
who follow me from town to town,
in the distance I see two dozen yellow
school buses parked in rows.
All come to the midsouth fair
to see my cousins the beautiful hermaphrodites.
A crowd gathers around me
frowning at my holy grail,
a used popcorn popper too shoddy
to even donate to the Goodwill.
Under the cracked plastic bubble top
a few grains of salt remain with the dud
kernels petrified by time immemorial.
Out falls a transparent yellow tensile
handle to something that is gone.
On its underside is a raised diagram
an old sigil worried down by the hands
of the bossy kitchen angels.
I strive to concentrate upon
the message of the lost handle.
I shout, Turn off that radio!
Two jackasses spring down
off a tailgate and flip me off.
The eyelids of my shrinking audience
droop with nearly oceanic pity.
They whisper, Don’t take it personal,
you’re a decent climber.
Once I brought down to Ponca City
a mylar birthday balloon gone flabby,
a grease-spotted bag of cashews
half eaten up by the seraphim
and everybody just walked away.
Too puffed up to take home this stuff
the archangels can’t move in their own yard sale.
The old prophets received some dazzlers
burning bushes parted oceans seventh seal.
Oh my fellow human beings, step this way,
step beyond your puny life insurance policies.
Take the lamp missing its cord the chipped
alabaster piece of junk and channel the offering
with common redblood wire. Its light will show
how to disconnect the nuclear panel
to save the world simply over the counter.
If you can take from my knobby hands
the dullest knife the flattest inner tube.
I cannot tell you what God will have you cut,
or how you’ll float a river to the Most High.
I guess you’re all too scared to make a move,
or like they did to Isaiah, you’ll probably
saw me in two for giving you something
rough instead of something smooth.
