Our Bible is Fiction Too

Every couple of months we go out into my back yard and pretend to commit suicide.
Once his weight was too much for me, and I fell from under him.
He could have suffocated, with the electrical cord around his neck.
He was a boy scout who could tie any knot in the world,
And who told me that dying was the only way to really live.

He put blanks in the gun to show me what it felt like.
I had never cried harder in my life,
And never felt more free.
We started the “Nihilist Workers Party”,
And laughed as we handed out photo-copied anarchist literature—

That we didn’t even believe.
             Wit was never so under appreciated.

For Halloween we gave the kids Marlboro blacks tied with orange ribbon,
And at Christmas the cookies left for Santa were laced.
His closet smelled like lemongrass, and in afternoons I would sleep in there.
I would dream that my cigarettes tasted like blood,
And that our insides were wires like robots.

We stole books from a local consignment store,
And burned them.