I am a father who has no son
but sits beside someone
who bears the names I gave him.
I am a father who has no son
but sits beside someone
who bears the names I gave him.
The television flickers. The ballgame comes in and out.
The players have rippling faces. The outfield is fuzzy.
Old men sit around on rickety chairs shout at the screen.
They curse the umpire’s call, they cuss the clueless
swing of the bat, and they spit oaths at the reception.
The male perspective has been
A claustrophobic dimension.
Projecting stop-watched choreography,
Minus context and emotion.
pennies on the train tracks
pop rocks and coca-cola
razor blades in apples
red eyed creature under the bed
cyanide in advil
an alligator in the sewer
roach eggs in the envelope glue
and a part time kidney thief.
But now all the young boys
play Diablo 3 on their computers and
chat on the Internet with little girls that
are so far away.
With the menopause of chlorophyll
the leaf’s green mask falls away
and her true colour can show
I’m writing my confession
in crayon, each sentence
a different color, each
telling, perhaps, a fairy tale.
But I swear this is near the truth
as I sometimes color it.
Today there was no money for the bar,
so I settled for the cartoon colored liquid
in my cabinet that makes it a little easier to settle.
When you can not afford the good stuff you must settle.
For less love.
Less food.
Less pay.
Suspended from himself, Harry left his body
and pulled back the curtain on a pervasive darkness.
Rows of blue flight numbers are aligned
with blue times, I bounce my eyes back
and forth between to make sure I’m seeing the right pairing.
I am on the opposite
side of this too-long airport: Gate A, and I have 25 minutes
to make it to gate F, for the connection.