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BURYING THE DEAD

Stucky never planned to be an undertaker. He’d always harbored a lifelong fascination with death: he wrote elementary-school papers on vampires; he’d always had an aesthetic romance with gothic icons like skeletons and a "fanatical" fixation on zombies. But when he started his graduate studies at Vermont College in poetry, that fascination matured into something more concrete. One night after a "boring" shift at a local bookstore, Stucky randomly dialed a slew of local funeral homes he’d found in the Yellow Pages. He offered himself up, admitting he had no experience but was eager to learn. One hired him as an apprentice.

As an trainee, he learned the burial-trade basics: embalming, preparing the deceased for interment, removing corpses from their deathbeds. In reality, the on-the-job tutelage was "trial by fire": on his first day, he had to transport three separate bodies from hospital morgues.

"What lay before me, it seemed wasn’t real," Stucky writes about the first time he saw a human carcass in Hic Jacet. "The whole body in fact, seemed to have grown a second, inexact skin that didn’t fit right in places... Every joint was akimbo in a fashion that would seem almost comical if it weren’t for the fact that this was a dead body, my own fate, a reckoning of mortality.... There are no real words to describe a body that is dead."

On Stucky’s third day, he and a co-worker lugged away a hefty man who’d died from AIDS complications in his South End apartment, falling facedown on the kitchen floor while his partner slept in the other room.

"I started to realize how strange it would be to go back to the other side and not have access to death on a daily basis," he says. "Imagine if someone told you that you wouldn’t meet another person under 10 years old for the rest of your life. And all of the sudden you’re not exposed to children anymore. For me, that was what it would be to leave this job. I couldn’t imagine that if I leave this job, like, ‘I will no longer see dead people? I will no longer be able to be exposed to that aspect of human existence?’ Once you see it, you look around and you’re like, ‘Holy shit, how come everyone’s living a lie?"

While Six Feet Under treats corpses like props, Stucky casts them as supporting actors in Hic Jacet, an in-progress first-person recollection that seamlessly interweaves prose with black-and-white anatomical-plate diagrams, dreamscape hallucinations, and untitled poems. "The personality of the recently deceased is still very alive to Janaka," e-mails friend and illustrator Mister Reusch, who plans to collaborate with Stucky on a Hic Jacet–inspired graphic novel. "They have this bond that goes beyond a guy in a black suit wheeling a dead body under a sheet on a stretcher down a hallway, to two people going down a hallway together, as companions."

Hic Jacet limns a sobering portrait of a young man whose work repeatedly thrusts him into an infinite cycle of intensely raw moments. At one point, Stucky chauffeurs a tanned widower ("the kind of old guy I picture doing infomercials for high-powered juice machines") to the hospital to make arrangements for his just-deceased wife and finds himself wishing he knew how to be more comforting. "I want so badly to say something. I want to say that we all die, that every one of us loses somebody and that everyday I take someone somewhere and somewhere else," he writes. "I think if I could, in some dark way, take away from myself something to bring back to him — a thumb, a bowl of blood — I would. Instead, I had nothing for him except a ride. I offered only silence, which is really all I have."

Understand:

[(your energy) = {(your mass) x (the speed at which you desire)}]

— "Austrian Therapies for Modern Maladies"

DEAD LIKE ME

During one overnight shift at the mortuary, Stucky got talking with an IT technician from an affiliated funeral home who turned out to have similar interests in gore, camp, and monsters. She’d even started her own spooky-striptease project, Black Cat Burlesque (BCB), performing under her pseudonymous alter ego, Miss Firecracker. She was looking for a choreographer; Stucky’s girlfriend Jen is a dancer and horror fiend. Jen became Firecracker’s choreographer; Janaka became involved by default. Before he knew it, he and Jen were squirting fake blood and sharing the stage with acts like the Dresden Dolls and Gogol Bordello.

Stucky’s BCB alter ego J. Cannibal almost always dies at the hands of his spidery mate Mary Widow. But he doesn’t see playing a perpetually dead man as contradictory to undertaking. "Part of working in the [funeral] business was me coming to terms with the fact that I’m already on my way toward death. So for me to die over and over again, it’s almost ritualistic or ceremonial. It’s me at play, me celebrating the inevitably of my death."

"He just puts himself out there and does it large," writes Miss Firecracker in an e-mail. "Whether it’s with his writing or producing a show or playing the doomed boorish foil to one of Mary Widow’s deadly femme fatales."

These days, Stucky doesn’t spend as much time caring for cadavers as he once did; he’s now at another funeral home in Brookline where he does only two overnight shifts a week. "I’m still very death-centered the way that I think about things," he says. "But I don’t want to be just, like, the ‘Undertaker Poet’ anymore. It’s a Godsend for setting up a reading tour: he’s the ‘Undertaker Poet.’ After a while, it’s like, ‘Okay, that’s awesome, but there’re a lot of other things that I’m interested in.’" Right now, he’s predominantly interested in amping up Black Ocean and publishing three releases next spring.

Heading home from Forest Hills Cemetery, after dusk drove the dialogue back into his car, Stucky talks about his goals. He says evenly, "I would like people to embrace the inevitability of their own death. That may sound kinda weird — or maybe even a pat answer — but for people to embrace their own death is, I think, vital to enjoying life." He pauses. "I also really want to convey to people that poetry is not only an acceptable, but really effective medium of communication." A second passes and he says, smirking, "That and maybe like some free cocaine backstage at a book event. Signing boobs at Barnes & Noble — that kind of thing."

Black Cat Burlesque performs Saturday, October 29, at the Vampires’ Masquerade Ball | The Lyceum, 43 Church Street, Salem | $95 | www.festivalofthedead.com and with the Dresden Dolls on Monday, October 31, at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street | 8 pm | $22.50; all ages | 617.931.2000 | Janaka Stucky will read as Stone Soup Poetry’s featured poet on November 21 at Out Of The Blue Art Gallery, 106 Prospect Street | 8 pm | $4 donation | 617.354.5287

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com.