Welcome to the Mercurial Muser

An Ode to Sunbathing in the Cemetery (in honour of spooky season)

I came to sunbathe with the corpses. To take communion amid the warmth and rot. To surrender to the sanctity and silence of a sun-soaked séance, suspending myself in the liminal space between here and gone. The dead don’t mind. They were once warm too, with eyes that flickered and drank the sun. I lay my blanket between two headstones—Beloved Mother, and Gone But Not Forgotten—and unbutton my dress like a sacrament. The sun extends its rays and finds me. Finds the soft parts. Finds the grief curled up behind my clavicle like a quivering, soft-bellied prey, and kisses it until it stops twitching.

I offer my body to the Earth. Grass presses against my back like a thousand quiet hands. Bees hum elegies. A crow heckles me from a weepy oak. I raise my sunglasses and wink. I am not here to mourn; I am here to remember. To bronze my skin with the residue of love and loss. To feel something, anything at all---down to the marrow. To remind myself I hold decay in my palm the same way others hold a bouquet of flowers.

Someone—probably in pew or pulpit—would say this is wrong. But I am here, and the sky is here, and my body—this exhausted cathedral—is still breathing. The tombstones don’t flinch. They’ve seen everything. They understand that worship isn’t always on your knees. Sometimes it’s just about remembering your aliveness in the presence of those who are no longer.

In the distance, I spot a freshly dug grave alongside a row of headstones bearing the same family name. I gaze at the forgotten, crumbling markers standing wearily amid others carved from the finest marble. I wonder what their legacies were. Time erases everything. People always forget. I turn my attention towards the solemn monuments still tended to by the shaking hands of grief and love. I think of the bodies slowly dissolving into the Earth beneath the votive offerings and vases of flowers. People never let go. I breathe in the scent of soil, gardenias, and rusted brass—growing slightly resentful that we waste space even in death, and that, for some reason, our loved ones make shrines for us instead of letting us find our way to the next incarnation unburdened.

As for me? All I possess is a beating heart—tender, bloodied, and raw—to leave as a grave offering. Maybe that’s enough, I think. I eat a peach, juices dribbling down my chin. I sweat. I cry just a little. A breeze lifts my hair like fingers that once held me. And for a moment—just a moment—this macabre picnic of skin and sorrow feels like a resurrection.

Life is a beautiful, rotten thing. And I am proof of that. I’m still here. The sun still looks for me. Just ask the departed.

Well, you could… but they probably wouldn’t answer.

Growing In

On boring days

I flash the neighbours.

The twenty-year-old

across the street

doesn’t seem to mind.

He flirts

while I walk the dog—

Crocs on his feet,

that dopey pube stache grin.

Tapered sweats,

too small

to hide

the eggplant.

Maybe

that’s the point.

I’d never

fucking touch him.

Not in real life.

I always liked

the ones

who didn’t

follow trends.

But I like

the attention.

Even if it

feels hollow

by the time

I hit the driveway.

And maybe

he does too.

I used to be

something.

I used to

love art.

Now I get angry

dusting

the same landscapes—

no closer than

my living room.

My husband likes

to remind me

how I used to fuck

like a bad girl

underneath the sun.

His friends used to have

group chats

dedicated

to the bathing suits

I wore

in the summer heat.

Like I was

supposed to

never degrade—

only bloom

for the love

of a man.

Now I have

a favourite spatula

and trade

in Rae Dunn

collectibles.

I used to

believe in

uprisings

and pixelated dreams

pasted to

a poster board.

Like I was

supposed to

grow up.

But instead,

I’m growing in.

A muzzle to wear

over that pretty

filthy mouth,

a tiny, beaded noose

from a craft kit

kept high

in the cupboard,

a fading light

kept alert by

a persistent

electronic tether—

all it’s good for is to check the weather.

(all it’s good for is to check the weather)

But the sky

ain’t blue today,

as I lie

in a top-tier bed,

scrolling the weather app

that freezes every time

I try to track the storm,

sobbing into a silk pillowcase

in the two-million-dollar house

I’ll probably

waste away in.

The Mercurial Muser’s Manifesto

Updated: Feb 12

Another day, another nightmare about the world staying exactly as we know it. Chin up baby-girl, it ain't all blues-a-plenty. Today could be the day you convert your husband to Marxism, and before long you'll be reading Rosa Luxemburg together on the sofa by a swollen fireplace and every morning you’ll swim naked in the hyaline lake and as the day retreats you’ll write manifestos on your lover’s body underneath a blood-soaked moon while he plays with the caramel tendrils of your hair and earnestly asks you about your hopes and fears and suddenly your eyes will gleam again even when you're dubbed a misandrist because you finally remember what you look like beneath the gaud and gossamer and you'll invert and reframe the fragmented distortions of yourself that you've only ever viewed through the cracked lens of the male gaze just to reify time and time again with perfected pirouettes and you won't have to appease them by slathering on any greasepaint to cover up your beauty marks or to disguise your scars as if to hide who you are and you won’t become overstrung when they constantly fawn over you because God forbid you don’t hit the notes right and you'll shatter the illusion that you'd make a good ingenue because you’ve never been helpless you only just acted the part you were cast in and most of the time they wanted a manic pixie dream girl and they never really knew the real you nor even wanted to because of your tendency to rewrite the script to suit your mood and scream seditious soliloquies as soon as the stage lights fade out but now you’ll never have to pretend that you don't know the things you already know even though a ‘nice girl’ understands that it's always better to act interested than to be interesting and you'll sell off all your shares in whatever night-soiled hellscape we've created here as the billionaire boys’ club stands high atop a mountain of skulls and your children will understand your passions and your phobias alike so when the hourglass is running dry you’ll already be packed and ready to fly even though you can't see your wings yet and you’ll never be made fallow or expected to produce a masterpiece on a machine operating with rusted gears and when you're moribund and ready to release yourself of all your worldly attachments you will have already convinced your babies that you should be returned to the Earth and spread as soil that feeds the worms and nourishes the trees instead of holding some mistaken belief that you'll be happier in a bird-covered silver jar on a dusty shelf overlooking a mass-produced art print and trendy silken house plants and they won't be waiting for you to die just so they can inherit more than your petulant mouth with its distaste for packaged goods that suspiciously never expire and they’ll fondly recall your aversion to artificial Christmas trees because you hate that they're scentless and spiders don’t crawl out from the pines and they'll remember why you said you felt a sense of deep malaise when you visited the Palace of Versailles because greed comes in gilded form and if you lived back then you'd be storming the gates and they'll get wistful about your disdain for all the lithospheric interactions that left you wanting more because they could never touch the core and end up lost in the minutiae between the ceaseless doomscrolling and the unremitting to-do lists that never seem to matter anyway and maybe one day your son and daughters will finally figure out what this incarnation is about and that’s the point of having babies because God knows it's not to make you happy or even to make you proud, it's to grow them from seed to sapling and let them experience this Earth as humanly as possible so they can fervently march forward to be absorbed into expansive beams of light and to explore darkened corridors and to stretch their pliant limbs outwards through every passageway in-between and to dive in the caverns of a drowning heart and to cut through the immured ceilings of the mind and maybe one day they'll know why the oak tree bends but doesn’t break and why the trunk becomes inosculated instead of standing alone and then when their skin sacks fall away they'll understand you were just trying to get them closer to their own knowing while still trying to seek your own if only to find that which calls your soul home…

with every hard won breath, with every stumbled step, with every tangled web, on and on and on she goes…

July 5 - See into the trees. Find the girl while you can.

Updated: Mar 5

I wander through dense brush

and set lush forests ablaze

to find hidden realms inside myself

and leap from crumbling pedestals

to illuminate lessons learned and reified.

Every iteration of every girl,

for there have been many

in so short a time.

34. The botched year.

35. The year of humility.

36. The era of growth and self-discovery,

of quiet lulls and contentment

and peace...

maybe peace.

No hustling.

Just being.

Just living.

Just seeing.

Just breathing.

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