just scream
scream into the void.
it will scream back at you when
you least excpect it
The sickness is now self inflicted;
The last thing you should have to endure
is a gawker interrupting your modest toilet
of Aquafina water and corpse gray rag.
For all I know, you’d been scrounging,
begging, dodging unspeakable horrors,
to afford this opportunity to remove
hard weeks of sweat and grime.
I suspect on so hot an afternoon
the water felt good-silver cool,
the breeze luxurious,
your spa as fine as any Roman bath.
You stood partly in shadow
partly in light strong enough
to reveal the worry lines of addiction
around your eyes, the nub
of a chin where teeth had been,
our Venus of Clifton Street,
working that damp rag
over crusted neck and pits.
I confess, I saw more than I should,
and upon that look,
I hissed Nice,
and became someone I didn’t like.
I walk through a cloud
of cloying sweetness, heady
olfactory punch.
It knocks me back to days past,
the purpled hedge of childhood.
Little Feat on the radio and a silent run ‘cross
roads Californian some week or other in late night of November
sees cactus blossoms popping up like Whack-a-Moles in the windows, I was cheated.
Short-changed, we pass another exit, roads lit solely by pinhole lights floating in filters
of low-down whiskey clouding my mind over moonless roadside, no—
she can’t actually think for a second I’m the only one
who destroyed everything, she was sick too—missing an arm, an avid basketball player—used to do left arm pull-ups on a jungle gym and punch me
to condition herself,
but I paid no mind. There was beauty, then she left—
a divorce when I returned
from asylum in
August ’99.
My father stops the truck for gas and says forgive her.
Stepping around a gas depot for a quick “breathing treatment”
I return to talk to Dad
about how my remains would best be kept when I die.
An eighteen wheeler ran down on us with a massive neon cross lit
up on its grill, like a cat chasing bird broken winged—and it seems appropriate,
but my father doesn’t care if they shit on him, so
he buys turquoise bolo ties and caffeine waters for the road. Mother is not one
for corpses, would never stand by a casket—whether cherry, walnut, or oak
lined with flowers, I decide to give her grace and burn
in flames to float in ash—away a splashing hound in baskets
on creeks and rivers through Kentucky.
Sometimes, the little spotted lamb I married is a dog,
drops solids in the grass with that guilty look beagles get,
and she walks away victoriously. She lights candles to St. Anthony
for my discovery: huge surprises—yes! step in the mess, yes—!
she left me with nothing when I was four months sober,
had tried to make me her ward, declare me incompetent,
made me wash from head to toe before I touched her,
took a father from his children when he was on the mend.
At the bar guys tell me these things happen, life is
nothing lovely, nothing calm—my thoughts come to razor—
but all is calm in this desert. I boil, I do. Looking out
from the window, a star goes
supernova blinding the moon, my children appear, as it were,
as world encrusting diamonds in assured, bright settings.
The wife steps in. Those are cubit zirconia. Her jewelry was cheap,
an expensive woman.
Men with books and time to read them,
Men who live at home without jobs,
Hoards of them sleeping soundly in the day–
their anxiety high and their parental love
so warm it curdles around them and stinks.
These men have no idea why I’m mad.
They want to date; Be my house husband,
they want life to go easy on them.
In the morning, they scrape their own car windows
and leave mine frozen. They won’t,
they can’t pour my coffee for time.
They rush home just to sit
in their mother’s presence. Pour her creamer
into their own cup and say “I beat it— traffic.”
“I won” maybe she applauds.
The type of man to leave without goodbye.
Walk right out of your door,
Leave it unlocked while you shower
in the only womb for you that is still warm.
They leave you to yell their names begging
For toilet paper. A towel. Answers.
They don’t understand why you’re mad,
Even less why you’re afraid,
Why you carry a gun like a middle name
Pepper spray as close as a child
How childbearing is deadly. They disagree:
The women in their family happy to be
giving trees.
The scar, sharp and straight
the dark night of the body.
Your scar is where life
in fact did
from root rise.
All the gay bars, of course, know their abandoned
patrons. Especially at Thanksgiving.
The pool tables at the Black Cat
in Silverlake, covered in white plastic
and food for miles. More than anything
I’d seen at Aunt Pauline’s all-you-can-eat
spread. They had three turkeys,
two with stuffing: one with oysters, and
one corn bread midwestern. Another
with water chestnuts, snow peas, and kimchee.
Also some crazed tofu thing
someone sculpted to verisimilitude.
Several versions of beans, greens, potatoes
based loosely on where they were from but
also made more flavorful by additions
of what they learned by leaving.
And for sure that made them all the better:
Anup’s samosas, Kevins pervert pinwheels,
Ariel’s bbq baked beans, Jesus’ frijoles of doom,
Sandro even made a desert called Death
in the Afternoon which was a bloody red flan
with raspberry coulis and Rioja jelly balls.
An entire smorgasbord of we’ve got you
and you’ll be just fine right here.
And we were. Stuffed with food. Lubricated
with lemonade vodkas and Irish coffees.
So that when we left and walked west
along Santa Monica Boulevard into the placid setting
sun, through a world that so inviting
and so much our own place, we did not think
of old home Missouri or starving. And we did not think,
in the long term, about where we were going.
We inhaled as if human, comfortably,
for the first time ever, ambling in the rough
direction of home.
