There’s a feeling one gets
oftentimes evoked when people wear clothes too tight for their skin
or hotels by the ocean that have pools
and you wonder if the pool gets jealous
does its’ hands get clammy
does its’ mouth quiver with wondering
why it tastes so much like bleach
and if it feels as exposed as a schoolboy’s battered knees after Sunday mass
and the feeling is reiterated once more
this cramp of the foot, this skipped heartbeat you become so fixated on
As you watch the old man on the crowded subway
pick at his scabs, the ones he got when he was 23 or 24
he can’t quite remember anymore but it’s hard to remember
such fine details when your clothes smell like ***** and your
children don’t visit anymore
so now he’ll sit on anything that moves as long as it propels him forward
as long as he doesn’t have to see the wrinkles
in between the birthday cakes and the heart medicine that
he’s supposed to take but what’s a chemical to a heart
and what’s a heart to an electrical socket someone with
a medical degree keeps poking at
so this feeling starts getting a name, starts calling cabs and giving them fake addresses
starts moving in and calling itself mister Al on week days and Sister Wendy on the rest
and now the soap stops cleaning and your hands becoming red with scrubbing
some internal message you were supposed to detonate as soon
As you graduated college but the degree was burned in a fire
and all the things you were taught were sold at half price in local yard sales
and so you stop eating dessert for dinner and stop living and
start recollecting, start rewinding the past, time traveling back to a
time when the sun would hit your eyes as you walked crooked streets
the pavement cracking like frost of a glacier in mid September under your feet
and as your voice gets low you smell the scent of lilac flowers in a basket
carried by a woman in threads of agave and cotton, colorful shawls draped
Across her bare arms, wearing rosaries in both her hands chanting words
that you could almost know but you don’t, asking if you’ll buy the flowers
made by the tears of god, crafted by the arthritic hands of mother Mary and
Don’t you just love the virginal white of martyrdom
but there are stones being thrown across the street by rude boys in t-shirts
long enough to be dresses, jeweled numbers on their backs like football players
or prison inmates and the distinction is not as clear
as they ricochet off the tough brown skin of the woman
you begin seeing embers of scarlet and it’s beautiful in the way
the slaughter of a thousand roses by the hands of scissors is beautiful
but the taste of disgust is not far behind,
and you wish the lilacs were a shield of ivory armor
And you wish the boys were boys and not men
there’s a feeling one gets
and I’m afraid you’ll always feel the feeling
like the peel of a peach