granddaughter Halloween.

(subject to change)

Ok, Halloween has a granddaughter. I want you to meet

Mariam, forty-four, female, unconscious and unresponsive OD’D on alcohol and anti-depressants, who last night learned that 1) cement curbs make lousy pillows, 2) bars are not beds, 3) dreams run red when they leak out, 4) you will not find blankets in bottles or bedframes in rain run-off. She was draped in the street, a bedsheet with holes for eyes to see outta. Mariam’s dressed up like a ghost again. She’s in us. She’s humming in all our backalleys.

Dear Mariam,

I’m gonna breathe for you. I’m gonna write you a song and sing it straight into your mouth so I know you’ll get this, if it helps you can call it a kiss. I’m gonna bring you back and call you granddaughter, cause I think you need a grandpa’s help.

With love, still,

good ghost Bill.

(here kids, deliver this, a letter a nursery rhyme a lullaby

first, hold it under your tongue and show me like you shake like I shake like a kid with fever burning afraid. Hold it like a star like a son like a newborn. I been working hard on these words. I know my granddaughter will read this. Mariam. Now on, I’m writing to her. y’all are messengers. Deliver this. Wait wait, I got one more.)

Dear Ghost Love, I wrote this poem for you. I wrote you a EKG strip with a good strong heartbeat fold this here into paper plane wings hold ‘em out sail and sink slow. When you get six feet down in here and down there then say these words aloud:

‘I’mma get up again. I’mma get up again.’

Grandpa wrote you a white bedsheet.

I gave my hands up inside a rain puddle broke the shell and tore it out.

go ‘head tie it round your head and blindfold yourself. Tell ‘em it’s a crown, yes, oversized and slipped down over your eyes but you are still a queen. You are still a queen. You are Lady Justice. Lady Liberty Kali Sophia Mary Mother of God and most of all Mariam of Bryan, Texas. Here I wrote a hundred statues in your image. The others, they got some kneeling to do.

And have this: purple nightgown. Grandpa wrote that too.

You feel the rivers in between the folds?

good, step inside granddaughter.

grandpa wrote a theatre in there.

It’s on the coast.

I’m there now. Aisles and hallways dark and overgrown with grass, it’s scary I know but it don’t have to be. I’ll walk you through it you hold my arm and I’ll read the words I scratched on my elbow from way back when, it goes

‘mar i am i am alleluia

lay your burden down.’

Grandpa wrote you a shotgun in a shotgun shack to break apart and bury. Lay down your arms, you young’uns and young guns split your double barrels, kids, bend ‘em into legs and get to steppin’.

Grandpa wrote you a shovel. You can dig up the stage under your front lawn and graduate in the soil. Walk across this. Get in the earth. Ma chere, you wear that dirt proud like a homemade dress when you bloom so bloom upside down. It’ll feel good.

Grandpa wrote you these dancin’ shoes. See how I step with my hands? We’ll dance around death a round life like in a circle.

Grandpa wrote you a good man, he’s somewhere under all these pages I know he is, even made his bed in it. When you find him, kiss like this. Kiss out graffiti murals announcing revolution between your lips, like you’re gonna overthrow an empire with this.

Grandpa wrote you two hands to make, so make sure to make like a letter fold over and get enveloped in this. This art thing, it’s an ocean laying supine chest rising and falling coughing on waves of its own blood.

Grandpa wrote you this night, it’s curled up with us stranded skin soaked in sea shivering, scared of it’s own dark. Granddaughter, hug this night say it’s alright and lose a little more light. Granddaughter, we will all sink singing into this darkness. That’s what the blindfold’s for. Go ask a dimming lightbulb, a dying star, fires in Alaska, the graveyard ER shift, rifles standing outta sand, say it with me,

‘Yea it’s scary but it don’t have to be.’

We’ll pick these waves out our eyes here soon. And call ‘em songs.

Grandpa wrote you two arms to slap the earth with your words. Something’s gonna hit us back. God maybe, cracking a two-by-four soaked in holy water across our heads, making our halos ring like wedding bells. Look, the splinters in our skin are bible verses. It’ll come again and again one of these Sundays.

Grandpa wrote you a second helping of heat. Here: a mother’s arms. A husband’s chest. Nine months in warm black hide and seek. A map drawn on your blankey look see? You can wrap up in this and get warm.

You can roll over in bed and sleep-in-wake-up from this rain to an ocean, this curb to a coast. I’ll try and scare the baddreams away with my pen and write better ones for ya.

Right about now, I’m writing lines of brick. I’m workin’ on a hospital wing out back. The one up there yawning wide with its arms. It’ll grow feathers here soon. When it does, I’ll meet you there.

I’ll be outside your hospital room with your niece and nephew, they got ghost stories and I got poems, under this light, they look about the same. We wanna get the chills and get good and scared. So we trade what we got, and try on the other’s spines like dress-up, ghost waltzing to the EKG beep inside. We’re gonna scare our hearts back into beating. I mean, it’s Halloween. And we are there now. All of us.

(Kids, I got a floor full of floorboards that needed changing let’s pull ‘em up like weeds and breathe and step down into this and sink. Waters nice and warm. Bring a pen and the blanks in your skin ‘cause we got a long way down. Nine months or so.

Kids, deliver this. And while you’re out, could ya get Mariam here another blanket or two. She’s been shiverin’ in her sleep I think. I appreciate it.)

I wrote you Love yea I wrote you Love,

good ghost bill.