by Will Walton
this dad along the way down here,
and I see him on his bike sometimes.
He rides up and I don’t see a mom or
another dad ever, and so he does it
His whole life, parenting, et al., alone, but like
how does he get there? To the point where he can even
Do that? After some kind of shattering?
What I’m asking is, from where
Do you get the strength?
I walk that way to catch a bit of
the light the color inside the house makes.
Lava lamps are making a comeback,
no TV light flickering, so nobody awake, &
The light is dim enough that it
goes hand in hand with noticing. I think:
A body needs to sleep.
I am trying to learn.
I do wish my body, like a schedule, a dad could make.
Sleep at night, work during the day and make a life that
I am proud of?
Having gone through a shattering, it would be easy
to do, I imagine. Deserve
A happiness,
having shattered; it is easy to
Accept.
What I’m saying is that, if I am learning anything
these days, it is that the buildings in the craters of
the bodies of adults are there as a consequence of
a shattering. Which they are then forced to locate,
and then build into, out of, on top of.
And it’s how you make a life, accept a
happiness.
What I’m
asking is: Am I shattered enough already, or am I
shattering? (And when do I start to build?) Maybe
If I keep it at a distance, say,
as far as my hand is from my mouth,
While I’m holding the orange vodka drink,
well, maybe I’ll get struck by lightning instead. When I stretch out my palm, I can feel the potential.
But I contract it again, worried: If I am learning anything, it is that bitterness, in younger years, crystalizes and then sweetens:
forms a rock candy base, which then, when you’re older,
rots your teeth. And then they replace your teeth with,
guess what, more rock. More rot. The logic being to replace
rot with rot, to cancel it out. It is the circle of life. To own
the sickness first. Like with bodies. Antibodies. Fight rot with rot.
I.e., beat it to the punch.
“You have rock candy teeth, old man.”
I saw the nurses’ reactions, pleased, one less thing to clean.
I want pink rock candy for my teeth when I am old,
so everyone will know I’m still queer, and haven’t lost it.
“You are really rough!” Remember
When John Wayne said that in The Searchers
to the young man whose eyes were so blue:
I was falling in love. I was falling in love, and
you were cracking up,
And I was just eyeing the man with his shirt off.
Replace what rots with rot, and what’s rotten is fixed! It’s ingenious, except it keeps perpetuating: like in family,
Sometimes I do feel like there are two of me in here. I think everyone I know has lost someone, or, at least, like me and Luca, was born missing someone.
Ms. Poss lost both of her parents when she was younger: Can you imagine?
She had no siblings, so it was like she suddenly became the only one to carry all their stories, meaning
The stories they told and the stories they were, but she wouldn’t ever tell them, not even to herself, because they made her sad. She said she barely even grieved. And then in college, she went to this art show, a performance, and the artist said, “Under your seats, there is a lighter. Now, hold it up if you’ve ever lost somebody.”
Ms. Poss held up her lighter, and then she wailed. She wasn’t the only one wailing. She says
She’s convinced that art can heal both the artist and the witness.
She said that my poems might be suffering from over-condensing. I need to let my poems breathe a little.
Well, I have brought this one outside, Ms. Poss. Does that count?
I like a book that makes you do things with your body, like a Peter Pan, when you’re clapping to keep Tinker Bell alive:
“Dear reader, will you clap your hands with me?”
[Keep my grandpa alive?]
Oh and speaking of old movies, “You’re tearing me apart!” That’s from Rebel Without a Cause, speaking of other old movies with a (then) suggestion of queerness.
“You’re tearing me apart!” he roars at his parents. Because they are, but not really. I mean
Jim is a privileged, hot, white teen.
In fact, what tears him apart is the way he sees his dad as castrated by his mom. It’s weird, so then tie that in
To evolution, and Jim’s dad “should have been gay,” as Katy Perry said once about an ex in a song called “Ur So Gay,” before she sang a song later about kissing a girl, which was problematic for other reasons.
I mean, imagine being
torn apart by two
People
Parents.
It’s funny, Rebel starts with Jim at night, in the street. He is wasted and lying on the ground nudging a little toy monkey playing cymbals. And Jim is cool.
People fall in love with Jim.
A queer boy and a straight girl, both.
Before the film ends.
Guess which one dies.
And Jim is in the street at night, drunk, alone, party, like me, when we meet him. I am cool, or at least, I am not doing anything that Jim wouldn’t do.
This street is mine. I almost wrote, “it’s my street,” but that didn’t quite do it. That didn’t quite convey. The streetlamp lights, except for the bold dark square at the end of the block, where a man in a house once raised hell
about light pollution.
He had left a city once, already, he explained. He didn’t want to leave again.
“Out of the frying pan,
& into the
—?”
You know, Luca told me one time that he lucid-dreamed. I do not believe it for a second, because of the way he said the lucid dream went.
He had this realization within the dream that he was dreaming and he started to move stuff with his hands, allegedly, like he was telekinetic.
Now doesn’t that seem a little too “on the nose”?
I can’t even remember my dreams most of the time, much less control them. I can control a poem, though. Look:
k !
L
o
&n
bsp; o
Have you ever heard the joke, How do
you make a poem dance?
Well, it’s easy but you have to play
some music, so right now, we’ll
Choose “Afterlife” by Arcade Fire, because
it’s about death, and getting through,
But it helps to forget about the lyrics.
Press play:
I don’t know what the instrument is,
but it sounds like tiny car horns.
I can’t teach you and dance to it at the same time,
so here goes:
A aa e
Ae e
Ae a
Really, it’s not even that impressive.
Nothing cummings didn’t already do,
but it’s hard for me to fully let go when I’m being watched.
The chorus:
“ Aae
eeaabogado
(abogado, abogado)
— swim.
Did you know that there is nothing
after life? ”
Okay, I am really sorry, this is actually a hard song to do.
For what it’s worth, I am literally dancing
In the street now, like a “kid,”
I am shattering. I am thinking
We all tote around a rot, a sorrow—
In our bodies, like a
Puberty.
When do I get mine, if I haven’t—
And I hope (how did you get yours?)
That I have? What I am saying is—
like in Peter Pan—
The issue is not (really) growing up too soon.
You know what the best use of the word “kids” I can think of is? That MGMT song, “Kids,” and they don’t even say it in the song, it’s just the song’s name:
and the song is more about nature like all the best art is: I want to believe in something bigger
Maybe that is what happens when you shatter: a belief in something bigger. You let a light in; you can’t help it. You emerge a sudden believer, and a-sudden, you have the strength that it takes to build.
Hey, look at nature.
No, look at it.
Every time I start to, I get self-conscious: But there are so many things in nature to see, and I’ve not seen a-one, and now
It is dark out,
And everywhere
Are wasps,
and I am living hand to mouth in
the mouth of the dull orange drink.
But if I finish I can set it down.
What I am asking is: Did I shatter my mom?
A cat!
A black cat.
Hey, you’re a black cat, not meant to be a bad omen, I hope—nah, I don’t believe in that.
Though you are the crow of the land.
But, now you’re gone!
Well, that’s why I like cats I guess. They play you.
“You are really rough!” I call after it. Like life,
I don’t mean
To laugh,
Or death.
I mean,
I like a text that makes you do things, physically.
Lets you know that you’re alive.
Like, remember in Peter Pan, that scene when the narrator asks you
To clap if you believe in fairies—
To save Tinker Bell from dying?
[Did I ask you this already?]
And you do?
You clap.
I mean, [I clapped].
What I’m asking is:
[Could you clap to save my grandpa from dying?]
But no—I didn’t.
No, I won’t ask.
Because what if you didn’t, or don’t.
And what if you felt, or feel, bad for not doing so? Or it doesn’t work, and so you question your beliefs.
No, it is too much to ask,
But I didn’t ask it
[clap, clap, clap away]
anyway.
In high school sometimes,
A boy walks down the hallway
And other boys start clapping.
“Clap if you believe in fairies!”
It’s oft-quoted. “Clap if you believe!”
But I’ll be a fairy,
any day. So long as I never have to grow old and get rock candy teeth.
“You’re tearing me apart!”
That’s just the way of it.
1. Oh another thing I think about, periodically
2. About Peter Pan, is how
3. The mom learns about Peter when she’s arranging her kids’ heads at night
4. while they sleep.
5. But she doesn’t bring it up with them later: It’s
6. Against the code of moms.
7. But it’s necessary because how else is
8. A mom supposed to know what’s troubling her love?
9. Words like “F—”—and “DAD”—and “PETER” appear.
10. I’m awake now,
11. And I’m sensing she has rummaged.
12. Because she’s calling me.
13. Susannah rings.
14. I answer,
15. “Hello?”
16. “Hello, Ave?”—and by the way she says it
17. I can tell it’s wrong,
something worse than we
18. “They’re telling me it’s, uh”
19. “he has zero brain, uh, activity”
20. “he is only living”
21. “by machine.”
What happened is he fell, my Pal, and then he stopped being able to speak:
First, confusion of words: his first wife’s name for his girlfriend’s. Then girlfriend’s name for his mom’s. Then “sky” for “water,” “bait” for “breath.”
Then the invention of words: “feefer” for remote control, “REFAMA LAG TAN ME!”—that kind of thing.
“And I, I just wanted to ask you”—she clears her throat—“do you want to come say goodbye? You don’t have to, and I’m scared to leave. But maybe Gia can drive you, or Luca? If
“you don’t want to involve them, I understand. If you don’t want to say goodbye
“I understand. You were with him in his last good days. You may not even feel like you need to. You were
“with him already.” But I want to, I do, to
say goodbye. “I want to,” say.
“So I will call Gia, to come give you a ride.” “Mom, no, don’t worry about calling her. I can call her. I will get there, don’t worry.”
“They said they’ll take him off support around three, and when they do that, he could
he could go instantly, or he could,” she hangs
on, “it could even be, it’s
“sometimes”
“days.”
“I’ll be there.”
“And if you could look in his shop for some things, if
you, if you have time, maybe his favorite book.”
He has
two, though. Which one? He has
22. The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton and
23. A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
24. And I will bring along “The Fish” by Bishop too.
“… w
e’re just sitting here,” she explains, “in the quiet, and the sound of the respirator is”
—”
I tell her I will grab the book and be there as soon as I can be.
“It was because of the
medication he was taking.” She keeps explaining. Like doctors are explaining it
all to her right now, as she relays it to me on the phone, in real time: before it’s processed (a shattering):
“It thinned out his blood. It was that
mixed with the alcohol that caused the
bleeding.” It thinned out his blood.
That, mixed with the alcohol, caused the bleeding, the
medication, for
diabetes, McFlurries hidden in the shop freezer, the secrets, the fact of
(“… not just the drinking … the lying, the deceit … inherited … !”)
as though to say,
whose fault? that led to
—”
25. Be honest about how you feel
26. With the people you love
27. Who love you
28. Who are worth it.
29. I am feeling love for Mom right now, and so much sadness.
30. I tell her so, her only father.
31. “I’m so sorry.”
32. She is feeling love for me too, and sadness
33. And helplessness and uncertainty and fear.
34. She tells me so.
35. Even the hard stuff.
36. That’s how it goes, my best friend.
—”
