Patricia The Surprisingly Woke Skeleton

my buddy patricia, jaundiced and eroded by age,

the magic holding him together nearly finished,

sits and drinks with me every sunday, and even though we’re old friends,

lately i’ve been working up the courage to ask him to stop coming,

it’s not that i don’t want to see him, but i know he struggles with the stairs,

and to be honest the beer towel laundry bill is starting to kill me,

but anyway we’re clacking away when i run my mouth about wokeness,

and it’s a real foot-in-mouther, a real boneheaded - sorry - thing to say,

and he listens, eerily motionless, then croaks a reply,

gentle speech undaunted by his missing tongue and lungs,

tells me of a time when he defended an ancient temple,

when a band of heroes came to plunder its treasures,

they’d brought a village boy with them, dressed him in spear and helmet,

paid with a careless handful of silvers, easily a year’s wages,

threw him into the temple first, snickering a promise to follow,

and, white with terror, that boy groped in the dusty dark for traps,

fruitlessly bidding his eyes to adjust, before finding trouble, an axe, 

wielded by a spellbound set of bones belonging to my buddy patricia,

he goes quiet for a bit, and you can tell he’s really haunted by the memory,

and every time he stops talking i’m not really sure if he’s, you know, gone for good,

and sure the necromancer-industrial complex is unquestionably evil, he’s not arguing,

but in a way he hates those adventurers more, because they had the agency to do better,

could have chosen to put themselves in harm’s way, not like patricia;

his bones were swinging that axe heedless of what he or the boy had to say,

anyway, he finishes, if you think about it heroes are just fancy colonizers anyway,

and he hadn’t even touched on the intersectional implications of race and class,

and that’s why, not that he was offended, but thought my comment was a little off-colour,

and i have never been so thoroughly chastised, least of all by someone without skin,

and as my own bones groan to the fridge to get patricia another beer and clean towel, 

i weep quietly for that boy, and for patricia, both with no tears left of their own