I guess I thought
that if forever looked like anything,
it probably looked something
like
this -
poems
for the rest of our stupid li(v)es.
But now,
I'm just so
hilariously
immeasurably
depressed
that it feels like I'm finally ready
for (c/p)ea(s/c)e.
A breakup that no one will talk about
cause who the fuck cares about no names
like us.
Well.
I guess I'm speaking for myself.
Lots of girls care about you.
I'll tell you the truth,
honest to God, this is the truth -
I think I was supposed to die with Nick.
I think we were fated to fight forever.
I think we were supposed to kill each other
in a series of pudgy-palmed
flat-fisted
swats.
And I think I was fine with that. But now.
He's gone and picked fights with the ancients
who hit
a lot goddamn harder
than me.
And it's a real stick in the eye, knowing
I'm so damn easy to
leave.
Did I make this about me? Good Lord.
The truth, the truth, the truth -
I Am real easy to leave. People
are seeds blown in a restless wind,
and I am nothing so capricious,
nothing so left to
desire,
I am a castle whose moat drowns the curious.
I am a prison whose only inmate escaped.
And now I sit dumbly
and watch from the crow's nest -
there's nobody there, but I watch
anyways.
When he starts to coulda-woulda-shoulda about
having missed the boat
on serial
killings,
I have to fight the urge to blow whistles.
Who's Whistles? Glad you asked.
He's the clueless little man in charge of my ovulation -
the one who giggles at words like 'zeitgeber'
and just assumes testosterone will fix
everything.
He could have been very successful, he says
and I wonder how one gauges success.
George Foreman would be the man to grill about it.
Hah. You're too young for that joke and especially
too young to remember
he had no
finesse.
Lump Man. Walk in.
Fist down. Bop head.
He was successful, but easy to forget. Maybe
if he cryptically talked to his kids before fighting,
he'd be easier to
recall.
Maybe he means it like famous.
Or maybe
he means it like coontails splayed out on a
rack.
The inordinate amount of testosterone in my body
is what keeps my teeth ground down
to nothin'.
When he tells me that
he could have been
a
successful
serial
killer,
I feel all the soft spots in my body ball their
finesseless,
long for
gotten
fists.
i.
It is nearly midnight.
I am sober(ly watching my son sleep)
and I am up to my sautéed squid in wonder
as to why my mom is still
alive.
She should really be less pleasant,
I mean,
she's got every reason,
every Right to be
angry.
Proper angry.
The kind of angry that studies
the toxins in white
oleander.
ii.
My father is passively killing himself.
The doctor held lab results up to his face
like a piss-soaked silk tie
to a dumb guilty dog.
"You're going to die"
"So what", dad replied.
I asked him to start making arrangements.
He laughed.
Arrangements sound like work for suckers
still on Earth.
iii.
I am sick to goddamned death of feeling
like a chump for wanting to
live.
i.(2)
She is love. Endlessly. She is love.
Endlessly.
Isn't that
fucking
hilarious?
She met the devil like I did
when she was about the same age.
She married a man she didn't love
and had three kids she never wanted.
She conquered alcohol abuse and still remains
so goddamned
pleasant.
ii.(2)
He wouldn't know love if it cut off the crusts
from his fatboy salami
sandwiches.
He is everything he ought to be
and I still find time to mind it.
I am impossible, friend.
Mission. Tortilla.
Impossible.
iv.
Do you know that there are people who think
that I gave up on Nick?
Like nothing. Like we had a bad night and I
packed the kid and sent him straight to
hell.
Don't tell me I don't understand love, you numb fucks.
I understand it so well, I wrote it a song -
"I'd raaaather you diiiiidn't kiiiiiill yourseeeeelf
but if your mind is made uuuuuup
and you care about meeee at aaaaalllll
don't fucking make me waaaaaatch"
Alright. So it needs some work.
v.
Like me.
Like you.
ii.(3)
Like dad.
i.(3)
Like mom.
No.
Not like mom.
She is love.
Endlessly.
v.(2)
And I am sober-
ly staring at our lifetime of shoes,
wondering whose I'm supposed
to
fill.
0435 is the second worst time.
You are touring the future
or
reliving the more favorable past.
Assuming you're still an adult and you're not
groundhogging the last trip we took
(to Houston, where we fucked in full view of downtown
and you told me you thought
Herb would root for
the Astros)
assuming you're any age at all
and have the freedom to relive anything you want,
you're probably six
years old.
At your grandfather's house
holding an old
fishing rod.
Your sister is standing behind you
and you
are holding up
a fish.
The nearest body of water is miles away
but there you are,
beaming like the Christ
before he knew what all he'd have to do.
3:49am must be the loneliest time.
3:50 is mostly 4
and 4
is mostly 6
which is damn near 8
and hell,
at least guys get up to pee
around then.
3:48 is nearer to 3:45
which slinks back nearer to 3:30
and that
is when the last of the youth
spirals down into
bed,
like a commie wrench in a copter blade
straight down,
as Robert would
say.
3:49 is nowhere at all.
It is the single greatest reminder
that love
is
not
wai
ting
up.
My father says that he secured the perimeter
with a loaded shotgun at 2
in the
morning.
Each word saunters through with the energy of
an Olympian tasked with transporting
the torch.
He talks about killing himself, sometimes.
He talks about killing us.
Us - his ungrateful family. He -
the unsung pro
ta
go
nist.
He heard a noise and went to patrol because
that's
just
what
men
do,
Brit.
My father. Great Ape.
Second fiddle. Seventh moon.
I imagine he walked past our rooms with his
shotgun over his
shoulder.
I imagine the narrator said something like,
"They were safe with Big John
around."
I am sitting in an Urgent Care.
I am sitting in an Urgent Care
and before they can tend to my stupid wound,
the nurse has to ask if there's Any chance
at all
that I might be
pregnant.
And I crack the same pendulous joke,
"Well you have to have sex to get pregnant, right?"
and it scrapes the sides of my mouth coming out
like some empty plastic tube long since
absent of its own
juice, but it
Always.
Gets a. fuckin
La.ugh.
My left hand, now Comically covered
in blood,
exhales in a huff and I swear
it's a woman.
My hand is a woman and her wound is her party dress
and she didn't want to come to this
lame ass office gig,
but now we're both here, and I've got the nerve
to ignore her and flirt with the nurse
instead??
She gives me three shots of
lidocaine
and four
stitches.
The tetanus shot holds that my hand cheated
first.
Believing we would someday have a daughter,
I collected my husband's bottle
caps
for some future art project.
Hot glue b'dazzled
female
thing.
Shiner. Kers. Bud Light and Bud's friends.
Mich Ultras. Those date rapey hard apple ciders.
For color contrast, I'd thought, but then
he was never one to drink
for taste.
I kept them beside his prettier bottles.
Maybe we'd fill them with sand and smooth stones.
Maybe she'd hold them like telescopes.
How I loved when he'd smile,
"She's gonna look like me, you know"
Football head. Whistlin' lips. Flat thumb nails.
Red dress hips.
"She's going to whoop Herbert's ass", he'd warn,
and I'd picture our son,
more like me everyday,
taking his licks but insisting that she
at least
put the bottle down
first.
My son is now the proud owner of
his very own
Tickle Me Elmo.
And when I say proud, I mean it rivals the whites,
not all of them, of course,
You're probably fine,
I'm talking about those seltzer breath whites
the ones who still use their fingers to count
how many gods there are/how many Mexicans they know
(two gods by the way
if we're counting
Paul Walker,
and it's Those whites so we're counting
Paul Walker)
I've gotten off track, but you get the point.
My son is dangletooth proud of this Tickle Me Elmo.
So I'm sitting on the couch
and I'm thinking about
how many more years before I lose my love's
voice.
Round, but imperfect,
shaped more like a canoe
deep enough to hold the water
his points-of-view never
could.
I'm going to get old and he's going to stay young.
I'm going to get old and I'm gonna forget
what his rubber band voice sounded like being shot
from his finger gun lungs, laughing at
Paul's expense.
I think this as Elmo yucks it up in the bedroom.
His family wouldn't know
what I meant.
It's 0238. I'm three beers in.
I've got cupped palms coned around my ears
and something like
affection
for
Zelda themed dubstep iterations.
Lord, please give this message to Nick for me:
Do you realize that we talk more now
than we did those last two
years?
We have a lot more sex, too.
Lord,
you'll probably want to skip this part -
Last night, you asked how Herbert was doing.
And I told you he was great while I
unzipped your dream
pants
and I sat on your dream cock and that
was pretty funny cause you always said
I treated you like some piece of
meat,
but you oughta know, I mean, I hope you know
that you exist in everything I do
and I cried during that beat
drop.
"This is a serious matter and we expect payment."
It probably isn't, but I always hope that these letters
are written by teenage demons in the debt
collection sector of
Fresh Hell -
"Ms. Ortega,
you cunt, you
bill dodging, call ducking,
no espeakee english
cunt
you can pay your debt in money or blood,
the latter of which
you've got
plenty of."
And they send those letters to the humans they work for,
Southwest Recovery Services in this case,
and they read it and smile
"wish we could send this"
And what arrives instead
is a sterile finger
wagging and poking
my chest.
Galaxies reveal themselves in deserts, I'm told,
with all the casualness of a gender reveal
back when pyros still had to take tests and explosives
only came in bright orange and
fucked white.
And I like that they don't hide themselves,
stars, I mean,
they just throw themselves parties where no one else lives
and wonder aloud
where you've
been.
My son,
sack of rice,
palm of flour,
tuft of wheat,
be a dear and tell your father
that I'm working late
tonight.
He should already know
but tell him in Your voice,
morning bell,
iron quiver,
clink of crystal before dawn.
My husband, listen well, you grove
of leafless bucktoothed clovers.
When our son speaks, he recalls all
the joy of having loved you.
Some day, I will join you
in the every and
no
where.
Should you return as ballpark crickets
I will be your pampered grass.
Or awaken as a warbler, then I'll be your yellow
rump.
Or become a cedar waxwing
which would make me high rise
glass.
I imagine we are birds because
death teaches
stupid lessons.
And in that case, my son, you should
learn how to speak
through whistles.