Posts for June 2, 2023 (page 12)

Photo III

Open where light is reflected:
In the cherry wood of the bar, dark velvet fabric
elbows leaning, dirty oyster countertop
echoing hanging and caged bulbs;
                                                               

                                                                he is looking away
toward the bathrooms where she’s gone, bald spot
revealed to rows of onlooking glasses
awaiting filling, bottles
awaiting emptying,
all the while not seeing
                                            the unseen
photographer holding his phone–
waiting–because she is
supposed to

photograph the pair
when she
returns.                            

                He is looking away, in full suit,
one foot flat, supporting, one foot behind, on a toe,
ready to move.

                              She is, of course, out of view,
                                        outside the frame.

The outside observer snaps the photo;
doesn’t tell him.  Or her.  Then.  Or ever.  He will find it
later, while scrolling to find it—himself/her/them—again,
after he’s dropped her home for the night, drinking
the coffee she’d made him in secret, made him wait for,
tiptoeing through a house, then back across pavement,
barefoot in the cold, soles blackened,
her head on his shoulders–
embracing him in the driveway–
embracing them in the night
before leaving,

and he’s driving
the hour and a half
home.                                                                                    

             But for now,
he is looking away
from the shutter 
as it snaps,
                     spins,
         snaps,

and captures                                                                                    
a man waiting

for what he knows
will return, what he knows is
coming              
              before leaving
or having to

leave                  
or being

                           what is left

                           (end scene)

Lamotrigine and
Quetiapine Fumarate
And Propranolol

joy,
a memory,
left far from my mind
I stare with affinity at a smile so foreign, it seems stolen, not mine

what’s it like to live
in the lavender house
flowers, only shades of purple, grow in the yard
the architecture, cute and gingerbread like
quaint on a street with magnificent grandiosity
I would choose you
        labor in your garden
        read by your window
       cherish you as a treasure
I have asked God for a similarity
        there’s a blue a street over I adore as well
        a pink in close proximity
out of reach and today not possible
so I admire as I walk
noticing the colors most of all

Maybe it’s just me

But doesn’t Halloween smell like burning wood

Those scratchy princess dresses we insisted on wearing

Because for one night we got to be something magical

Too bad you could never see them under our puffer coats

We walked through the streets shivering and shaking

The one night of the year we tolerated the cold

We walked up to strangers houses as they awed over our costumes

Always calling us the wrong princess name

Leading to sone quite awkward tears

We came back home way past our bedtimes

Our parents lugging our absurd bags of candy

We dumped them out all over the kitchen table and sorted through them

The chocolate candy was the most coveted

Piled on the left side of the table

(conveniently closer to my chair)

The fruit chews and the bubble gum littered the ground

It’d stay in the cabinet for weeks with the promise of being eaten

Only to be given to my friends in January

It’s crazy how one sense can ignite such a memory

But every time I pass by a fire pit

I feel that happy warmth of Halloween

(Dixon Chisholm confides in his dip tin,
charts the protracted decay of his senescent foreskin.)

Dixon Petrarchus Chisholm
(to whom, once, love was
crushing a cherry in
moldering porcelain):

who’d hobbled my optimism,
my dowser’s wand, my
old Kentuckian flintlock
screwed and jackknifed over
the breast
                    of a twisted
chestnut, children
                                  stippling
hardly-freckled hearts with just plum
sticky fingers, tracing
a thrawn and flaccid cross across
chalky alluvium,
itching illegible sigils
in curd-colored mud
for just some glumly bloodless, bonafide
godhead’s chapped chagrin—oyez,
and there’s that ratkinged bastard again,
no more than a polyp, a pip,
a fizzling teratoma equipped with missing teeth
displaced, effaced, nay, feckless—

worn to a stammering dollop of dachshund dander,
Samson scalped—! with a suppling spall of obsidian
combing a throttling cat’s tongue,
strident steel set straight on a taut and sodden strop!

what gutless escutcheons coldly contorted to crucibles
curbing a key’s perfected teeth
                  to the puddling gums of a balding malamute,

baleen bitterly tickling tedious dust
from a bustle left cudding some suppling
bowsprit
                boring its glans through the
sniggering
                marl and sand for
                   fear or futures—

a bald cap swaddling sun-ravished jellyfish,
foil that’s shucked from a condom,
a condom’s condom!
the moldering plinth of a hang nail
swollen and red as the
sheepshanked stems of canned maraschinos
curled up like a snakeskin—

pain, profound, preponderant, pulsing…

pain, percussing a plummeting vein
          of obsidian pitched from an osseous pimple—

pain, the gluttonous echo of prattling waves
unwound around shapeless peaks and parapets
pressured from pointed sand.

Pusillanimous paean of plangent change
in a viciously limpid wind sock rawed,
a sarcophagus cobbled from skin sloughed,
thin as a lustrous, comely, cumbrous leer,
that skin peeled pale and clean
from a stone-scuffed knee
laid out among frothing rocks,
        demurred by the cringing crayfish,
        testy terns, those hobbling fiddlers
                               gods had spurned by
                               cracking their claws across gormless coral,

spry lyre of love or this
lyre of louring personhood punched
to a crinkling wasp’s nest—

this skulking conch I’d cribbed for a codpiece,
bunged with a plainly unfungible thing, and, yet,
here, now, as quick as a cork’s popped, squarely
deformed to a worming and gormless
flange found brutishly bilboed betwixt but
crackling alice blue lips of a maxima
                                                                     clam—

(then licking a butchered wad of chaw
he’d tongued between puckering gums and fumaroles,
wincing like Sam the Lion
confiding in children
his time in the tank)

—we’ll take to the desert then, though
lo! the castrated scorpions!
Vinegaroons,
                        their tails dissembling
broken bull’s whips,
                                   pizzles uncoiled
and rent,
                 detestably
redolent,
                 relevant solely
in grossest affliction,
                                       sun-sucked
mesas blunted, shorn to but bumbling stumps,
and the mumbling tumbleweeds tethered
forever
               to every aberrant sneeze
no wretched erection dares
impede,
                appease, or
bend at the
                     knee to

— where went those tors of foreskin sloughed
that rivaled the cock-beaded eaves of Sinai?

what grew of such sun-sucked dust,
this splintered sage,
the spluttering yucca depressed
by pale and nefarious flowers distressing
so lissome and slender a sulking stock?

Death Valley sits
scarce fathoms under
the merrily crinolined hem
of each boisterous sea disturbed
by but stalwart rocks, and
yet, by the way that the gila’s mocking me,
maybe old Noah was on to something,

maybe the sacral sweat
of Sanger and Mary
might just drown me yet—

(and his dip spittle slopped on a scalding stone,
recalling Khadijah and Brigid enthroned upon
snickering plinths of jet and jade, and,
burst from the bubbles the heat had bade,
were shreds of a small and stalwart song—
and Dixon swore it was “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”
and mistakenly twiddled)
                                              —what’s meant by, this—
                   Bananarama?!

emerald green shadows
waggle in morning’s orange glow
laketop liaison

make more like 
some of most-
                as often

this heart is
harder to raise
                on anger

level and silent
through the body
                and more.

When I die let there be nothing left to discard
but a body well used

Being of sound mind and body
I won’t leave behind to my loved ones
Old photos depicting unfamiliar faces
Dusty letters, writers unknown

When I die let there be nothing left to discard
but memories that fade with time

Being of sound mind and body
I won’t leave behind to my loved ones
festering recrimination and regret
old grudges, hurts, and hates

When I die, let me be dead

1. Where has he rotted most? A slick brown mahogany casket, or in you? Does your body recall every night he was not there? Or every night he was?
2. Do you wish he’d come back? If given the chance—you or him—would you even consider your options? How do we begin to forgive our fathers? How do we begin to love them without a face to put to the name?
3. Have you cried yet? Have you considered the empty halls of a ranch-style house? When was the last time you sat in bed with the lights off and spoke to yourself? When was the last time you sobbed and cried into your pillow? Do you let the tears drip down your face? Do you still let your father make you cry? 
4. Did you ever really love your father? Did you ever even like him? Did he ever even like you? How long do you think it will take to pick out the shattered pieces of the steel blade he left in your side? To pick each and individual letter and word out of your brain? Do you want to do that?
5. Would you go back? Would you go back to the days of melting next to his living room chair? Would you go get his beers for him as he gets drunk on Thursday afternoons? Does grief make us misremember? Do we just idealize the dead and call it “good times”? Did you love your father then? Do you love him now?