My childhood was the art of of a soul annealed in the heat of a father’s cold disdain inside a house surrounded by forsythia and a rotting picket fence. I only tell you this so that you can understand why crabcake make me queasy.

My little brother stood up in his highchair, his mouth frothing with the insanity of his toddlerage.

“Pa, why can’t ya get the little louse to stop, I’m tryin’ to eat my crab cakes. Gawd!” I said.

He glanced at me, and then at the mercury that read something over 90 degrees. He sighed, then I felt the walllop of his rough hand slam against the side of my head.

Hours, days, months working with chisels and sander sand others implements of construction had left him strong. He had smoothed and bevelled and built a multitude of beautiful things for anyone but us. Here, he only put together pain and set up hurt.

At work he was cool and sturdy – a hammer, a screw driver, a tool to make something from lots of bits of almost nothing. At home, he was icepick.

After dinner, almost every night, I dreamt of slamming his head into stone walls. Of dressing as a night and wielding a morningstar. It’s impossible to love a cold bastard breeze, particularly when you know somewhere out there is a zephyr, warming lush. Singing summer into some maybe less deserving family.

“Get to bed, you little prick,” he said into my still-ringing ears.

I don’t remember much of anything else really. Just a doodle of a cat on a napkin. I think he did it. I’m not sure. It was beautiful. Everything else drifted away into the night. It was me in a quixotic search for the connection between his cruelty and this cat.

“G’night Pa,” I said over my screaming brother.

Ma nudged him, “G’night kiddo,” he let out a long sad breath.

I went and brushed my teeth with the thin excuse for paste – store brand Colgate or something like that.

I could hear my mother and father arguing about money, she called him god damned niggardly and a fucking miser. and then I heard his hand across her face.

I started down the stairs, I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I wasn’t thinking. My head was still fuzzy from the impact. I don’t know. I just started down the first step and paused, when the riposte of her words stopped.

He was crying.

It was a sound like drill in a dentist’s office going through me, I wanted to scream. I wanted to run.

Pa got up from the table, walked to the sink and started to wash his face.

My little brother was slathering food all over himself, and no one seemed to notice.

“Jesus, Irene,” and spat out, at my mother like she was a spitoon, “I love that kid, but he don’t know respect. He dont’ appreciate a damned thing.”

“Jesus, Irene,” like a record he skipped, “I love that kid.”

I slipped back up the stair toward my room to fortify myself against another bleak tomorrow.

Then I laid on my bed as the last rays of sun came rosy through my window. I listened to a mosquito buzz around my head until my mother screamed one last time before the lights went out.

nickel on a pickle
a recreational joy
hay cannot seed
where tree and bee
hang nice crystal strings
a hearse of solid tunes
breaks on the mad chance
dips and sways the dazed
palsy stays grim
as moon drinks the tide
we bust
on stale beer
and ‘bingo’ we don’t hear

i sneak down route 133
to the place where the black eyed suzies sing
about you and the summer days
when we were too busy with children
to love as loudly as we should

i listen to the empty people in full cars
careen past between Lowell and Tewksbury
wishing they could be me on the side of the road
crying with joy for the golden petals
and the bumble bee grumbling
between their brown center

when I start to pluck the first
i know, I can’t.
love is best when quiet
i think
and then I feel better
about a thousand sunsets
I almost missed.

If i were a cannibal
I’d start with my pinkies
because they are salty
and sweet
and delicious to chew on
when the stars are pounding down
on the top of my gray hairs

i would sing about the joys
of the flesh that consume me –
an endless rendition of happy
happy birthday to me and from me
and down into the belly of me
where I can digest me and turn me
into the very best of myself.

if I were a cannibal
I’d end with my pancreas
because it offends me
because it consumes my sugar
because she was so sweet
and kind, when the stars were pounding down
on top of us
as we laid there
unrefined.

I would sing about the joy
of the flesh that consumes me –
an eternal blasting of angels from the throat
hosanna in the lowest, be man.
and down into the belly of me
where I can burn away the bones
of them winged hurts and turn holy me
into wholly me. alleluia, a man.

if I were a cannibal
I’d eat til i were full of myself.

A little man with a fake look
ing beard zips in to miss
pronounce the truth. lisps
Seth in french canadian under
tones. the accordian plays in the back
ground. wet foam washes down
stream. poutine covered in brown
gravy is served. “Apollo doesn’t go
to the moon without
my pa, he helped weld them giant rockets
ya know the ones that lifted them fellas
to the stars?” Old men shake
their heads, it’s a story
line they’ve heard too many times be
fore. the sunset’s a ways back now
the beer goes down smooth. They laugh
Seth loudest of all be
cause the little man pays
for realer than his beard looks.

i will tell you about genetics:
a cousin shares jeans
sometimes blue
eyes, sometimes a t-shirt
if it’s left at grandma’s house

second cousin wants to share jeans
but at that point, they’re ripped
& threadbare. t-shirts still get shared
but only if Aunt Trudy visits for tea & zucchini bread.

a third cousin refuses to share
jeans or anything else. no one really cares
at most, a t-shirt insulting your mother is worn
occasionally, & Aunt Trudy’ll tell you
everything she gave them for Christmas.

weekend eyes growl, wade out to take her
mouth. her lips. to steal away her breath
to drown with her, deep and painlessly
beneath the burning ache of sunlight
through the tall grasses and under lilies.
Stones skipped, ripples like heart beats,
a long pause in a lost moment, evening eyes
pucker out the obscure sighs that allude to her
mouth. a breath returned. she descends into
a sigh. another sigh. then a frog leaps
through the rings into the cool murk
of loud wishes. The unrevealed menace
of youth. her red lips twist again
as she smiles. weakened eyes beg
for her. only her. the breeze sighs.

thus changes every smile to a wan cool thing
and every tune to something else I dare not sing

words unsaid but etched in stone
thus always, love and love alone

thus transmogrify from man to beast
that which thinks and knows the least

words on walls around a soul
thus always man is never whole

thus changes every sign to hot desire
and every poem to kindling for a fire

words unsaid, forgotten in the haze
and every tune means less as it plays

thus transmogrify from beast to man
the knows and thinks and has no plan

the moon will come tonight
and stars like raindrops falling up
a million voices will rejoice
as the waves reveal that hope was enough

tomorrow, sunrise will write the story
of love on perfect puddles
a million ripples will share
the dreams of every heart

the moon, she comes tonight
in a silver dress, bejeweled and alight
with the honesty of what has been
and knowledge now
we are all right.

Oh madness by the waning sun
i twist about the haze of tall grass
suspecting, darling, you may be the one
with Whitman’s grizzled ass

Oh joy, beneath the frigid moon
I am the statue that always lies
beside the river with a silent tune
that is every star’s sweet sighs

We are the dance, the waltz that grates
flesh to dust, and dust to stone
We are the music, the crescendo of hates
balled up with lost trust until we’re alone

If every day becomes the apathetic rage
perhaps it best we stay inside love’s cage?