Posts Tagged Mother
Was I at Denny’s with her One Time?
Baby brown booth,
you staring, then shouts
tell me you
hate me; my
mother hates me, shows me I’m
shit living badly.
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Just Like My Mother
Slight changes in the breeze
coming from the North, wood
block sound chunks from
shutters. It was the
anticipation, breath stolen
by fear and if it wasn’t
next time, it would
be soon, but we could
never hold steady
waiting for any good.
Some days, the love
pierced through her
Detroit armor, her
French denial, some
days, she loved her
own children having
sprayed and cooled the
coals covering her middle.
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How Do I Bring this Badness?
I dreamt that my leg
rubbed against the furniture,
that there was green shit
on the furniture, that I
was furious with Mother, shouted
at her for putting green shit
on the furniture, that Mother
corrected me, explained that
it was cancer vomit, and I
prayed she would forgive me,
though she is long dead
and had never forgiven me
for anything else.
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Child Without Worries
Playing there is what came to mind
when you told me to think of a time
when I had no regrets and no worries.
My sandbox was in the shade.
All around me, sickness was in a
muddy crescendo. Dad left Mother,
but I thought I still had friends to play
with and would never come in for dinner.
Mother’s anger was starting a journey,
an 11-year eruption, and now I know,
on the other side of bricks and sturdy,
metal-framed windows there was a sanitarium
with no doctor, and the trees that shaded
the sandbox smelled strongly of vicious
poison, and they dropped gooey stuff
in my sandbox so there was a creeping
psychosis amongst my Tonka toys, but I
had not been trained how to properly worry,
and I sat there, getting more and more sick
over any measurable period of time, until
I blended with the tree parts and the sand to
make the most grotesque soup, and when
the soup started to boil, I learned how to worry
and learned how to hate myself, and then, only
then, fit into the sanitarium with appropriate
manners. I remember the expensive, light
blue rugs giving me false comfort.
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Stop the Music, Only for a Moment
I asked him to stop the music,
the raunchy, thrusting drums,
sounding tinnish, cheap, back
alley, but beautifully persistent
tom-tomming so that I could
open the giant egg on my right,
the casket for Mother’s corpse,
for I needed silence to bring her
back properly, to show her how
her son had survived her be-
littlements, and with great
alacrity, had shed the alligator
skin which she had poured on
in layers of muddy martyrdom,
and show her how I had erupted
from cages, had somehow begun to
like myself for brief moments, all
of which I hoped would allow her
to rest easily in hell rather than
trapsing this earth, working
diligently to finally, decisively
ruin me.
.
I’ll Never Be Cured
My brain leaks,
just like my mother’s did,
my brain hurts,
I’ll never be cured.
They throw it back,
they give me shit,
my brain leaks,
I’ll never be cured.
My brain hurts,
just like my mother’s did,
she threw the black pans,
hailed our personal failures,
told us we’d never be good,
but I’ll never be her,
I’ll never ruin your psyche
My brain hurts,
just like my mother’s did,
my brain leaks,
I’ll never be cured.
The world hates,
It foams in my head,
with no smile,
I know I’m no good,
just like my mother said,
just like my mother said.
My brain hurts,
I’m scared of you all,
‘fraid I might crash,
you’ll see my soul crushed,
for my brain’s dead,
excepting total despair,
yeah, my brain hurts,
just like my mother’s did.
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Brahms, Revisited without Tears for Today
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Brahms, Revisited without Tears for Today
Brahms has the twitchy fuse,
lighting me in acidic
flames and the arguments inherited
from old elephants, between piano and orchestra,
are trudging – me, I verses the world,
and I’m losing
but I’m pounding the keyboard
until I get a break, a breath, a sigh,
and I show this grace
that is un-Brahms
but is
Brahms at his greatest,
and when the horns arrive
in red army coats, you know
victory is grasped with dirty,
dry, crisp finger nails, but it
never happens, never consummates.
I am finished, a heaping
pile of slippery dung
when Brahms is done.
And as a practicing drunk, the tears
would wilt tarnished cheeks and create heat
emanating around thorny eye sockets,
but these days are desert dry, pain layered
and hidden and only Brahms, only the
master knows, knows the truth, and now,
at least I rest, I stop, I pray, lost.
.
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p.s. – Embedded below is the referenced piece, performed by my favorite conductor and one of my favorite pianists. The exposition of the first movement lasts 3:45, so patience is needed in waiting for the arguments between piano and orchestra. The climax/recapitulation of the first movement at about 13:20 is one of the most intense sections of music I know along with the ending of the first movement. It is immense music. The third movement is a kick ass jam if you make it that far…
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The Beginning of My Story
On that day, the weather was sporadic as it might be in the midst of the vacant, listless September, the clouds like a giant casino, filling and emptying with the winners and the losers, but Mother hoisted a natural cheer so I had been left out in the modern rabbit cage, hanging above the dark oily alley with strewn garbage and broken bottles, braced to the window (my cage), centered by the breakfast table. At the fateful moment, the winds having begun to stir without Mother noticing, some sort of vigorous weather event having snuck up from behind and from within the crevices of the Brooklyn tenements, it was then that one torrent of furious air swept the ash-can-like planter filled with mildewed soil with the outgrowth of a blusterous and half-dead, lost-red, filtered to colorlessness, mini rose-bush off of the ledge of the patio on the outside of Ms. Stilldinger’s unit, 8B, two floors up, one over to the left. With a tremendous twirling velocity, it nailed my cage, blasting the fasteners, bouncing me out of the back of the cage, as then I felt myself tumbling in an unnervingly slow motion, bouncing rather than ripping the canopy above the cook’s entrance (the bounce attributable to my nearly-perfect mass of 22.5 pounds having flown from 6 floors up), the canopy covering the cook, Freddy, who having heard the pot blast my cage had moved out to look up beyond the canopy in time to catch me in an athletic manner after I had bounced diagonally on the third bounce. This certainly puzzled me on the tentative value of baby cages.
Some babies come to the world as new creatures, new creations, but some come from another life. Some are from another world. My mind is aware of the future world I am from where cars fly instead of rolling. I’ve come back here as punishment after hanging myself, as if I had not punished myself enough all the way through to my last day.
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Terror Bleeds White and Steals Love
The blue feels the white creeping,
stammering all over it. Perhaps
modern, blown lines, almost like ink,
the master of all for logical beauty,
Scarlatti sprinkles forks of death,
arriving through valleys in gutters.
underneath door jams, violent forks,
seething and slithering through the grinding
grout, grabbing bits of drywall, making
all appear destroyed by these punk offspring,
one who is strung out, as if by an Oak Tree,
with desperate chords that symbolize suicide,
starting in the purple of the stomach and vehemently
climbing as if a vine up these poisoned muscles,
throttling the neck, creating a flu of alien proportions,
creating the birth of the unknown guest,
depression, and the other sneaking to the kitchen,
because he innocently loves the cookies,
the other being so sweet to all of humans
despite the poisoning from Swanson’s,
green beans of rubber, and not intentional
hate, but love that will not cover him. Love
that leaves him on the side of the road,
pulling weeds, sucking on hay. The other is the
one, but a strange god was there, and the mostly-
full, gallon can of white ceiling paint tips warmly
and lovingly, and the one without love falls
with the cookies into a thick, fast-moving, syrupy
jelly, bloviating white – almost a river, and the
source of the Scarlatti stops, stomps slowly to see
what has been done, and screams, and screams, and
screams, while the one with flu hides in the corner
from the dirigible of scotch bottles which is blacking
out the love, and the one with flu is dragged by hair
to the accident scene, and then again, the screams,
and screams, and screams, and 11 pm, 1 am, 5 am,
bucket after bucket, as if it will never come back,
hell being this permanent scrubbing – scrub, you
bastard, you fucking asshole, scrub, scrub, and
the blue starts to feel blue again with the white
creeping while before the white was killing, killing,
and it was all of their tears, cleaning the white,
but not all the white, the tears not stopping because
they flow in these locations where there is no love,
and where there is none, there is scrubbing, and when
you asked me about hell, this is one of thousands
of places I thought of, places, events, devoid of love,
and they are everywhere. Do not open your eyes.
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Suffering the Reds and Blues of the Breakfast Room
Most times, I’m not grown
enough to sit by god,
and I eat in the kitchen,
the breakfast room, plastic
plates, no knives, and god
cannot share his will with me,
my brain still frozen blue,
the mean boys stuffing me
inside the red romper room
ball with the tough round handle
on top, cackling at my
deadly future.
I see the service
dog, the beautiful
Shepard sitting patiently
with his mistress, she loving
him delicately, awarding him
for his perfection, and I
say I wish I could be you,
boy, for I know the beautiful,
the loved, sit in the dining room
and luxuriate in god’s
will, in god’s kingdom.
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stillfugue 