Truth teller I may not be
but occasional insights I get
and then I work very hard
in between. Cover me with sensation
and there may be hope emerging
from that turgid swamp.
The fact of my kids' teacher
telling my ex that the kids
shouldn't stay with me
(and her dad had been alcoholic too
so of course she knew)
this breaks my heart
even still. I'd quit by then.
Not to mention
the story of my younger brother
and the ways it's beyond
comprehension to people
of another era, which is almost
everyone by now - many have
died already from my own
little nugget of truth: four kids
born like a litter of shaggy pups
between '56 and '61, before
the Cuban missile crisis and
JFK getting shot dead but
during McCarthyism and of course
'On The Road' getting published,
that guy's got a beat and
he doesn't really know it.
But all the little people heard it
and got the beat too
and suddenly could talk about Art
and learn something about America.
I guess my Mom didn't mean
it, to scream like that, at the sky
and at us, like there never would
be an answer (and there
never was) but for Hartford
Connecticut, they know about
insurance, big squat buildings,
and Mark Twain with
two chimneys going round
the window so he could watch
the snow fall outside
with his fireplace below.
My sister went to her,
a certain configuration, but
I was frozen in boyish guilt,
younger brother a little off to the side.
I could and can feel the memory
being made the way
a typewriter key slams
on a page of nothing
and then the next key
if I learn to just put
my fingers on the right spots
and then return to rest
for a sec between words.
Texting vaguely brings this
back every time.
Talking is mostly painful
so I've decided to memorize
some Dylan Thomas and
Diane DiPrima tho Diane's 'Rant'
is a bit long for me:
"You cannot write a single line
without a cosmology,
a cosmogeny."
And my sister hugged her
like water on a campfire,
when you're ready to
throw your backpacks on
and get down the trail.
And now I kiss her on the lips
when entering her 92 yr old
abode, some cheap though tidy
apartment in small town
Western Mass, with an old
fashioned work wear store
up the street that calls
quietly to me, at least I can
build something nice, a home
for someone, if I've got some
Carhartts on. And wool sox
in winter, the real wool kind.
What my brother, the younger one,
needed or he wouldn't have built
a campfire in the abandoned frat
with Guitar Dave in Austin, Texas
near U of T and got thrown in jail
and died, yes these are the stories
the desparate tell, once clouded
in that skin, can we ever stop
explaining about America, X,
mental health and whiteness
and addiction and 'Death don't
have no mercy, in this land',
once we get past Barbie
and 'Over the Rainbow'?
Hourglass figures and mushroom
clouds. Mount Blue and
all the colorful mushrooms
on that steep and rocky trail
last week. Jessie and I
just knew we had to do it,
once we figured out, halfway
up how hard it was.
So many places to which
I can never go back
but a few
I'd like to.
