Summer Unbounded

Her melt into happiness

on the tip of my tongue

clots my bloodstream a river

of cappuccino steam

until a stroke of luck

cools me down



to a drip and a drop.

Our capillaries winded last past whimsy

with the rhythm and blues

of a gasping window AC unit

playing harmony to our ecstasy

as we wring sheets of sweat from the mattress,





safe for a moment

from a summer unbounded.

Gone Daddy Gone

A Coca Cola Coffin.

A Marblesque Bobble-headstone.

A Plexiglass Lava Lamp Urn

with Racing Stripes.

Some kind words,

or at least some kind of words.

Appeasement and appeals

to the gods and angels

that they welcome our loved one "home."

The rituals of a species

still early in their evolution.

We bury, we burn, we stuff.

We entomb and mummify

and jettison to the sea.

We conjure up fantastic scenarios

of reunited ghostly bliss

to quell that most primal of fears:

the absence of consciousness,

the disappearance of self.



What a horrific thought,

that something

- everything -

can in a quiet instant

become the void.

We think of that place

as a bottomless solitude,

ascribe emotions

to what is by definition their absence.

This is perhaps to me

the most merciful thing of all:

you're never around

anymore to deal

with what has happened to you.


You are gone, daddy.

Gone.

Cold Into Coffee

He hasn't the strength

to dream weary to his weakness

let alone the lift

to muscle out from his bygones.

She's only a tickle

in the lost recesses

of a mind but for that unkempt,

a psyche otherwise unmade.

The bedroom door

peels eaten, flakes forlorn

ground down by withering wanderlust

in the palm of its only handler.

The shower head bleeds

onto caulk-crusted porcelain.

Toweling off dawn's regret,

he faces the toothpaste, mirror and music

of another day.


Blending cold into the coffee as always.

Ode To Nancy Botwin

She sweetens the light

at the end of my tunnel,

leaking of mystery

caught wayward fantastic.

--

I open my fridge

seeking florescent solace

bleeding of boredom

and anti-depressants.

--

She comes once a week

in through liquid hot crystal

and lasts half an hour,

fading back into the ether.

--

I welcome her home

to my sunny delusions

then sour and sigh

amidst scenes of my sickness.

--

I am bathed in the maraschino

cherry of exhaustion

at half past tomorrow,

dull eyed with regret.

--

She's only a notion

but always my savior

if just 'til hiatus

when it dies of exposure.

--

Her wicked wide eye drops

to a promise born broken

in an eggshell of blues

with the yoke torn and running

--

like a nose choked with coke,

blowing out shards of horse shit

gummed to my optimism

like the sole of an unfortunate shoe.

Cookies and Damnation at Grandma's

Grandma was determined to save my soul from eternal damnation, a fate she'd already resigned to my parents. I'd have a wonderful time visiting on the weekends as a child, with her Norwegian cookies and her home's quiet nature, free of the smoke and drama permeating my own homestead at the time.  Wonderful that is, except when she'd tuck me into the guest bedroom and tell me a bedtime story.  It was too often a tale of demons and brimstone, of pitchforks and blood curdling screams that go on forever.  Satan ruled over everyone here and my folks were pinned to the coals for infinity with Lucifer's forked toes firmly ensnared 'round their necks.  My primal lizard brain soaked this shit in like a sponge and try as I did over the years with booze and coke - Beelzebub knows I underwent this method of treatment with gusto - and of late with psychiatry, I haven't been able to ring it back out.

Now this particular piece of dysfunction is minuscule when compared to the heaping helping of shit ol' Mom and Dad ladled into my psyche.  And unlike some of the things the folks visited upon me, Grandma's tales from the crypt were told with the best intentions.  You see, she had retreated deep into fundamentalist Christianity toward the end of her life after having lost her husband and son in the space of a few years time.  Grandma was suddenly alone save for an aloof daughter (my Mom) and went looking for any raft she thought might save her from drowning in this strange sea that was America.  Oh sure, she had other relatives around - a sister even - but it wasn't the same.

Grandma never felt comfortable here in the US, out of place and phase with a culture both too diverse and too fast for her, despite having lived in the relatively slow-paced, white-bread world that was and is Everett, Washington since arriving on these shores from her native Norway in 1929 with her husband and son in tow and pregnant with my mother.  She was woman not yet 30 when she first gazed upon this land and yet already well set in her ways.  She'd always been a "traditional" Norwegian, meaning a staunch and very conservative Lutheran.  She'd been brought up on a farm and didn't comprehend or approve of the pop-obsessed culture that dominated this country and mesmerized her children, particularly her daughter.  Her fun-loving husband was, in his way, fascinated with this culture as well so there was no commiserating with him on the matter.  She'd spoiled my mother as a child to the point that there was no hope of reaching out to her and receiving actual understanding or emotional support when she found herself a widowed sixty-something at the dawn of the 1960s.  She then lost her son to a heart attack in 1965 and was "on her own" in a very real way.

Grandma eventually married again, a neighbor, more out of loneliness than anything else.  But she gave her all in those last years - her heart and, yes, her soul - to the Jehovah's Witnesses and with it accumulated the Armageddon-laden baggage that such a belief packs.  Thus came the images of my roasting parents and the possibility that my sister and I might join them on the rotisserie should I not stand straight and fly right.  As such, whenever somebody waves a Watchtower on my stoop, I never fail to answer such a greeting with a hearty "Hail Satan!" before slamming the door shut in their beaming faces.  Well, I don't because I'm a wimp.  In fact, I often pretend to listen to their rantings before begging off after some imagined task they're keeping me from.  But I'm thinking it the whole while!

My time with Grandma was brief - she died of bone cancer when I was not yet 9 - and as I mentioned, almost completely positive save for this one thing.  Still, even as a fervent non-believer in any accepted theism - I've been thus since I was old enough to form an opinion on such matters - it's there, festering.  Nightmares of demons and terror.  I can't even watch movies like The Exorcist or The Omen lest I cower in fear for the next several weeks afterward.

I believe that whatever the great truth about reality, the universe, the multiverse, etc., that it's something far beyond our current capacity to understand and the odds that any group of people have guessed it right is stupendously small, especially when almost all of them believe it relates somehow to kings and angels and devils, good, evil, punishment and rewards, and all the things that seem very specific to a time and place long ago on our little old planet.  But that's just me.

Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite.

The Dyed In the Dermis Statue of Inky Naked Liberty

My father always had a lady on his arm and she was unfailingly naked. No, he was not a galavanting playboy or strip club devotee; rather, this was a tattoo that ran down his inner arm from elbow to wrist. It was one of the more visible, persistent reminders of the innumerable mistakes Dad had made while in the throes of alcoholic bliss. It was perhaps the single biggest source of embarrassment for the old man, who took to wearing long sleeve shirts at all times, even in the midst of a particularly noxious mid-August swelter. I'm guessing it was just too large to consider removal, at least with the means available back in the fifties and sixties when he might have been in the position to weigh such an option.

I never thought much of The Lady, and frankly don't even remember the details all that clearly. I think it adorned his right arm but maybe he had one on each; my addled flashbacks have been edited for sanity's sake and these bits must have been left on the cutting room floor. I do vaguely recall asking him about it as a toddler but the only really clear memories I've retained relative to this matter are the incessant threats my parents made as to just what they'd do to me if I mentioned "her" in front of others. The folks lived in terror of outsiders discovering dents in what they viewed as a lovingly crafted model of Leave-It-To-Beaverism. The truth is that dents were the least of this model's concerns when all that remained were gaping holes by the time the late 1960s rolled around, the ghosts of June, Ward, Wally and the Beaver flying off into the night in horror at being associated with our unique spin of familial dysfunction.

I think The Lady is the primary reason I never desired a tattoo of any sort and have never understood the appeal of body art in others, whether it be ink or piercings or like forms of self mutilation. In fact, I don't see the difference between a person with piercings or tattoos and the ragged razor scars of a cutter. Sure, there's an obvious difference in intent and the former might be more aesthetically pleasing than the latter; however, the psychology of intent can be many layered and not at all obvious to the conscious mind while aesthetics are, by definition, subjective.

A news recap this morning showing a group of Independence Day weekend revelers included a dude with what looked to be a very familiar tat running down the length of his Flexor digitorum and the hazy memories of Dad's ink-drawn Elke just sort of washed over me like a fog.

The 4th of July is often the time when my childhood remembrances come to the fore: it was my father's favorite holiday after Christmas and it is my mother's birthday. She'll be 82 tomorrow. When Mom was celebrating her 41st birthday, my cousin Jennie (my Mom's niece) gave birth to her daughter, Lisa (who, if my highly advanced math skills have calculated accurately, will herself be 41 tomorrow). Dad loved to buy and light off fireworks on our country's birthday and we did so each year until my Mom had her stroke in June of '72 and Dad took his final plunge into the bottle shortly thereafter, never to return again until his body bobbed to the surface for a toe-tagged gurney ride to the morgue a little over 5 years later. But prior to this slide into oblivion, I had a giddy anticipation of each Independence Day that was only bested by Santa's annual sleigh ride.

Where I grew up, "Safe & Sane" fireworks stands started popping up in June all over the town and we'd peruse the season's "new" offerings with excitement. Really, there wasn't much new year to year (sparklers and snakes intermixed with various pinwheels, rockets, and fiery cannons). No firecrackers or bottle rockets or M80s and the like. They were certainly available on the sly but Dad mostly stuck with the legal stuff. After the fireworks were expended and we were done running across the lawn with fists full of sparklers, finished watching the "snakes" melt into the sidewalk where'd they leave a stain lasting the rest of the summer, sick of going 'ooh' and 'ahh' at the pinwheels and sparkle rockets as Dad ignites their glory; after all that, we'd go to bed and wake up again into the usual drama that defined our lives outside of the spell of the 4th and Christmas (and, perhaps, for a few hours on Halloween). Thanksgiving sometimes dampened our dysfunction, but just as often accelerated it (sort of like a gasoline-based fire extinguisher, if their were such a beast).

The Lady on the Arm and 4th of July seem inexorably intwined, even if the random news clip hadn't jousted the Freudian gnome living on the European continent of my subconscious to change the reel of my yesterday-dreams to Scenes of Dad's Ink-stained Other Woman. I guess it's because pop did wear short sleeves while orchestrating the fireworks, likely because the fear of polyester melting into his skin outweighed that of the neighbors eyeballing his epidermis artwork.

In the end, when Dad was cremated, The Lady on the Arm went the way of the fireworks that freed her for an annual night unveiled. I guess it was her destiny.

Ooh, Ahh.