The Pig’s Soliloquy

1

Darkness, which is to say the pathetic fallacy 
that if there were such a thing as Time, He 

would have nothing better to do with his nights 
then piss out horrors on our little lives; is falling. And with it 

the sort of cold that makes your knees ache like you’ve bowed
in prayer for hours. My father is dying, my father

is dying. Soon I will face the ultimate dilemma; is there 
money in the will, and if so, how much guilt 

do I allow myself to wallow in 
before spending it. I have an overwhelming desire to play catch.

2

The fist, the tiny fingers of the little man who lives in my throat, holds 
my throat, are closing, his hands close around my windpipe from the 
inside. His name

is Terror, his name is Orphan. Someone
means me harm, you can’t deny that. They’ve put arsenic in the water 
and small pox 

in the hospitals. I have the blood of hunters. I used to kill; my 
ancestors, my father, 
used to kill, to be feared, but he’s forgotten

even how to live. Loss is a four letter word
that lacks the dignity to properly arrange the lips. This 

is a definition of strength. Allow me
to explain: shit folds the mouth into a sneer, fuck brings the teeth 
down to touch

the lower lip, then spits itself out, it is the Platonic ideal of the 
curse, it forms itself perfectly. 
Hell opens the mouth to allow air to hiss out, 

like a bike tire deflating in the sun. Notice
that I can only say the short ones. Nothing is allowed us. 

3

We bless them with the offerings of our days,
they give us in trade things that break on purpose

so we’ll buy more, things we don’t remember
that we don’t need. But they don’t remember us when we bleed.

We lack the grace of birds, or we’d shit on their cars. Dignity 

is what we’re letting them take from us,
inch by inch, grain of sand by grain of sand. Dignity 

and the ability to spell our names.