Sympathy for you nude minotaur of frozen ant dreams & noon lava hungers whom my father once chased despite chance of leprosy in the alone star state. Because you’d been glimpsed excavating graveyards believing you burrowed through casket & devoured cadaver, Tod Browning insisting you be Transylvanian pitted you with opossum & Jerusalem cricket. Consider—this was back when Edison submitted his last patent application, Nevada legalized gambling & widespread was the Great Depression. Also: although the background was not real the coach travelling the road was; Overture to Die Meistersinger was the opening opera; & the count’s castle?—painted glass poised in front of a camera. Waiting to be abducted impaled or brow tucked to tail snowball into hell & live blissfully pifflely thereafter. Or suicidal as ever crossing asphalt just to jut your tongue into   a blackhole & dine on spider. The doctors never differentiated if after his heart stopped my father was comatose braindead or vegetative—the hospital bed in the living room like a living coffin. Nothing dies here that need burying screaks the desert gothic but that mirage of a man begs to differ