Bang, Everything

Some were sold
Some were stolen
Some left some time back

Believed abandoned
in a duplex crawl space
an old note turns up

The universe talking to me
Remember what it said
Love’s casual recursion

A lot to answer for
Close my eyes and swim
White hole, white sky

In the long night, lights
flutter and quaver
Truth’s looping shadows

We will not speak
of this, the yearning
of empty buildings

Mama ran the washer
Daddy ran the clockworks
Touch me for good luck

for Bob Hamilton, Tom King, and Jackie Wilson

“You know, Billy, we blew it. We blew it, man.”

Wyatt, in Easy Rider

Scared of the man
I am trying to save the world
I have no right to write this way

I cannot deny the blistered sky
Always another story
Tugging at the scabs

Always another story
Duet with a suicide cousin
On the stereo in the barrio

Speak my name derisively
Too late, later even than that
Still⁠—I digress

I know, I know it
I am running to daylight
A rising tide swamps all boats

Scared of the man
Am I? Am I? Am I?
Chorus: Yes, you’re the man!

The red hair from her father grew long in the summer
of his death. She bore her wounds into high school
where they festered in study hall. The stepmother
stepped up the war she launched during his decline:

a new will, a shaky signature. Ashley re-befriended
her mother but there were petty thefts, lost curfews,
confrontations of the third degree, the occasional
disappearance, and a problem with substance.

Her mother commissioned a therapist to deconstruct
her life and conjure the dead father’s spirit, to teach her
to speak, to penetrate his iron disguise. He responded
in death as he had in life, with disapproving silence.

He was a master of the parting shot,
out the side door before anyone
could parse the pretty logic.

He spoke the tongue of the broken,
all his below-the-belt connections.
So many oars, so little water.

Ragged days, whiplash nights.
He said to me, “Jim⁠ ⁠… Jim,
I have come loose from it all.”

There’s a story there; it must bleed.
Of course, it must bleed. All things
and on and on, toying with his glasses.

His evening attire veered formal.
He showed one night with an eyepatch
and matching bowtie, ordered a Gibson.

He blew Pall Mall smoke rings,
raised the stem with a wink and said,
“What day is less than holy?”