Breadcrumb #48

ROBIN WYATT DUNN

Every corpse I ever loved I found in Bethlehem, down below the darker
tragedies of life is the eternal balm of death, and its milder
horrors, of decay.

Each skull I rap my knuckles on brings luck; each skeletal shield,
helm and sword I've made from the charnel is lucky. I am the luckiest
of men. In my basement. In my saddle. In my village. In my nation.

In my nation all men are equal; the women more so. In my nation we
await death as eagerly as children await ice cream — which is to say,
not at all. We shove it into our mouths.

I eat death with heartache, with resolution, and with force. I eat
death, my balls tucked handily into my trousers, ready to spill out
when the party finally begins, when the dead finally rise, when God
finally shouts us to our feet.

But I know the dead are always rising. And I know God is always
shouting us to our feet. Every morning. Sometimes at night. Or even
crepuscularly.

Crepuscularly I await meaning on the edge of my bone-sword, the same
way Napoleon awaits the moving of the spark to the fuse to the anus of
the cannon.

Like him, I am short, and angry. Like him, I long for death, and the
murders which precede it. Like him, I dream of Corsica like one might
dream of a river, eternal, running under the wood and the stone and
the earth, and running over it too, like it runs over my heart, and my
balls, fluvial love eternal, a river bigger than death, is the one I
dream of. Even when awake I dream of it, when I pop my head out of the
nuclear shelter, to threaten the tourists.

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