Ghost

The cat turns and stares
at something invisible to human eyes
before fleeing the cold room.
I often feel a chill
creeping up my spine
as if I am watched, unawares,
by some silent entity.

How do you speak to ghosts?
How do you commune with the dead?
The ancients knew a blood sacrifice
was enticing to the hungry shades,
a gory repast providing
the stuff of life
to evanescent spirits
who cling desperately,
hopelessly, to the light
alive in the vital essence.
Now they are lucky
to receive cakes and liquor
once a year from only a few
contemporary descendants.

If only I could determine
why this specter is haunting me,
disturbing my cats and myself.
Perhaps it is animal magnetism,
or the constant possibility
that I may make
a blood sacrifice of myself.

Perhaps my ghost haunts me
so as to foreshadow
my own afterlife,
for they say that self-termination
does not bring one to heaven
but rather consigns oneself
to the realm of fire and brimstone,
thence to move through purgation
of one's sins before
finally being welcomed above;
or, what is worse,
one condemns oneself
to wander the earth forlorn, forsaken,
with unfinished business,
rehashing what has gone before
without reaching closure
without finding release.

The patriarchs of the churches
played a neat trick on us all
by defining necromancy as great evil.
For, strictly speaking,
any communication with the dead
is a divination, and divining
requires communion with the divine.

It is not evil to speak to divinities;
prayer and hymn are holy things,
whether applied to a single god
or to an entire pantheon.
It is only because one god is so jealous,
so possessive and demanding
and wholly unforgiving,
that even talking to other gods
and, by their graces, to our ancestors
becomes demonic and profane.
Most of the wars of the world
and uncountable infinities of dead
were the fruits of three branches
stemming from one religious root
which has seeded the world over.

Ghosts have haunted me much of my life:
the dead of the long past, resurfacing;
the dead of recent history, unsettled.
I can see the bones beneath the flesh
and I hear the rattle of skeletons in closets
(your rib cage looks like a small marimba,
your skull looks like a a large maraca),
and always feel the chill of death,
like the palpable wave of nausea brought on
by the smell of rot and decay.