Dear father I must confess I have become
tired. When plaster crashes an I-beam
slashing antic cross the kitchen, flutes
crushed clinking with crap, oh father
I miss you. I am dodging
what’s owed and we wonder if debtors
sit prison still, celled. One sick organism
with flagellate flickering. Was it wrong
to want a calling a ceiling that doesn’t cave
or pay? The begonia growing upside-
down was getting near to fire-bloom
when boom she was beheaded.
Tyranny cuts off its shorts, goes sans culottes,
and we don’t see til we drip
with hailstones in the doorframe.
We toggle shifts slip fingers on wrists
to sense a pulse, but blood pounds in my foot
where skin stripped off from too much
white. Apparently I swayed. Apparently
I stayed there with my middle
finger blazing in a v-neck, grating hate
at his mouth on another & swamps & dragon-
face & Scots idiot pissing. Though father
you would have laughed at the knees
I capped and the grins I coaxed like bobcats
from their branches. Never mind the keys
creeping too close to my nose, the matches
cracking poprocks in my cortex. Never mind I woke
up in & out chagrined and wringing happy
paired and spinning shit to the cedars. Father
what hides up in these rafters?
Is there something to burn at stake or is this
the hysteria of escaped and glowing stag, the never ever-
after? I heard your graying saying I got waxed
again – all I knew was spittle venom
for scissors biting your gold thread, rage
that stretches past skylight to ozone
punching blackest holes so vacuum
cold howls in. Father why
when we are good and just – the righteous
do not move a mountain the righteous get
fucked – and fidelity grows us nothing
and our seed is scorched to dust in the bowl,
rancid furrow, I feel the seams may split
the side oh father my father, they lied.
I went to the backyard for balcony stars to touch
an archer, maybe bathe before sweet
watcher but inside skeletons roved my clothes
were jackal-eaten, mangy skulls preying
on praying for something their own
size wizened and whittled. Bankrupted by betrayal
and pursuant axillary boils, we stiffen
behind the driver’s seat with map and mindless
clipboard, glyphs & vital signs: what degrees
and breathing rate, an aneroid cuff on par with heart
charts the pressure and nurses know better,
you can’t overdose on relaxants, so grind – wind
tighter that machine oh higher string
those lights to blinker and see the Christmas
tree freak flash oh father I am
a hurricane. I’m biding til they try to gauge
the speed, come by with litmus strips
the soil eroding levees broken and oil gurgling up
the drain and hair stuck to the ocean. Birds
sit floating tarred. Unfetter, father,
hot water does not help hands
as you think, arsenic sits in your sink
and it hisses. Oh father I fry I foam
without sleep I’m a streak on the avenue where is our
fare for the ferry to Jordan? Our faces are hot
and the trees are hail-bare our songs are stripped
raw and the bedskirt it rots she’s dead
and you’re not and I pierce
like a mandrake a writhing child-root.
There’s mold in the noodles and soot
on tomatoes they tapped pretty powder
into her cup too, they blacked her refracting
my grace friend the jewel, they took
what was hers the swamplight the glow
in vocal chords cattails and grows as the humming
of strings oh my father, they stole.
These mausoleums flood and foul these bayou tombs
are shallow silting coffin lilting
boneboxes start to rise up before long. Do you see
by the obelisks, angels, upstream? These shadows
offend, Papa. This is no dream.