Claire, what was the title?
What was the reaction?
They told me bricks had fallen to the ground, that it took a lot of blood, sweat, tears and heavy hammers to bring down the devil's den.
That foul fortress of despair and wonder
Forever enshrined within the hearts of silly sailors everywhere.
There was laughter buried within those walls
But secrets.
Pain and mystery called together
Your name was not Claire
Indeed I know of no Claire.
It's a constant discouragement, this inability to complete a sentence.
Dualism they say.
They say dualism.
They say "Oh, no good, no good" but what they really mean is "You don't appreciate all the good things you have" and what I really mean to say is that all the good things I have were stolen.
Guilt turns to brightly shining example.
When I was about your age I was out working for a good ten cent piece. Uncertainty is a plague that I've lived with
From the end to the beginning.
When all I really wanted to do was to blow your mind.
Today is nothing.
Everything expands from a moment in time I lived through many years ago.
It may be lying to me.
I am easily deceived.

This was my life's work.
It's all I had going for me.
A head in a hand basket and a knuckle-rust sandwich for dinner.
Stored neatly in a corner
Reserved for mice and maggots
Wrapped in used aluminum foil
It's just as I left it
That cold and only day
Far away from grey skies and blue turtle tails.
I could barely concentrate on it most days.
Too much pressure.
Too many distractions and though I realized this was to be
My memories last stand
I couldn't help but feel as if more than time
Was being wasted.

All I could do was apologize.
It's the way my brain works.
Nothing gets done.
I fall in love with the thought of impermanence
Until the cold realization that it's my own illusion  
Whispering away on the wind and no one else's.
So
I fail again.
This beginning is near the end and it's no indication
Of what I'm capable of.
It's an anti-****** of sorts.
If there's a God in heaven,
If I haven't wasted all this life struggling against the weight of damnation in vain
I'll be redeemed in it's eccentricity
For eccentricity is all I've experienced.

Let me say that again.
I've courted eccentricity like a blind lover
Too eager for the afterglow.
The expectations I've hoarded are staggering
They make me an eager handyman of souls.
This eccentric nature I've absorbed
And yet it is loathsome to me.
I crave acceptance but ****** be the man who can figure me out.
It hurts so much to know I've missed you.
The signal resignation that I've been forced to grant normalcy.
Without sense or sensibility.

Should I speak in the third person?
Would you think I was trying to hide behind a character the thoughts and plans and deeds I might not care for your knowing?
Is that something I might do?
Those thoughts.
Those deeds.
Those plans.
They exist be they the property of
I
ME
MINE
or of Jerry the poultry dealer.
The only difference is that Jerry the poultry dealer is a fairly affable fellow.
I'm a *******.

The best time to spit your chicken little poetry
Is during the sad hours between midnight
And four in the morning
When the words get swallowed up in hungry darkness
And those who have ears to hear
Sleep the slumber of infants

Their eyes give them away
Hunted and lost
Squinting against the light
Witnessing the desolation
Of a thousand distinct emotions
And if this is not the worst thing in the world
Surely it must seem that way
From the look in their eyes

The sound of flesh beating flesh
Cuts through the silence in this room
Soft exclamations of bittersweet resignation
Whispering extracted lies
In a thousand tongues of fire
I know it's not the worst thing in the world
Sometimes it seems that way
When I hear the desperation in your voice

Lie now, in fertile fields
Soft, misty wet with rain
Swat bees in clover
Exquisite sensation
Of my every thought
Melting in the brutal heat
Of the difference between
How things are and how they seem

the wrinkles around my eyes
seem deeper now than they were
the last time i looked
steep, soft valleys
too often lately
flooded by saltwater
chiseled in skin
by experienced hands

I died in bed
On a cold December evening in 1977
Screaming hatred for my father
Muffled by a goose down pillow
Damp with hot tears
Seventeen spoiled years
Was there even a Christmas in '77?
I got the coffee table bible
My mother left for me
(She got one for my brother too)
The good old arcane King James Version
With concordances and maps
And incredibly realistic engravings of
The heroes and saints of Christian history
Abraham with his knife to Isaac's neck
Jacob's ladder, wrestling with God
David slings a stone, throws it at the giant
Through Saul God made David king
Jonah surfing the whales back.
Then there were all the portraits of Jesus
There had to be a hundred of them
I liked the one where he was walking on the water
And he bore the stripes with such dignity and integrity
The stations of the cross
The portrait that showed him lying down on the crossbar
As a brutal Roman warrior used a sledgehammer to drive nails through his tender hands and feet
He seemed so out of place between the two wicked sinners he was sandwiched in between
With their laughing and obscene mocking
I'm sure my mom hoped we would make ourselves part of that family
In some way or another
But I was listening to the Clash and the *** Pistols
I could have paid closer attention to what my father was going through
If I didn't have so much coming down on me
**** falling from on high burying me
In even more misery
The process caused me to distrust love
It caused me to write off joy as fleeting, difident emotion
I died in that bed
It could have been '75
But somehow hope had grown
In the midst of uncomfortable confusion
It could have been '76
Might as well hold out for the Bicentennial
Those were the days
I turned seventeen
And that number took on special meaning
17 in '77
Dad had a few nervous breakdowns
He put his fist through the wall
He insisted,"My nerves are shot my nerves are shot
$100 do this for me
You re the only she will listen to"
But I'll take the cash and the car keys
Why does it still feel like you were doing it to me
Off to O.K.C.
Have a little talk
About what I have no memory
But NEVER mentioning the hope
That you would come back
Despite daddy's tear-filled begging
Why?
I don't feel too guilty
It was all relative to how I'd been treated the year before
When I came home I was condemned
By a man who'd gotten out of the habit of saying "I love you"
So I felt justified
Screaming "I HATE YOU!!!"
Deep into my poor pillow

It would be easy to say I didn't truly hate him
In December of '77 I genuinely did
Almost 40 years down the road
I know it's the powers that I despised
It was circumstances dancing so clumsily
Caught up in the inevitable vortex that
Tears things apart with ease
But fumbles when trying to replace and rearrange what's left
Few there are who can survive
I wasn't one
I died in bed
Empty inside
Brain drained
Still as the motionless mattress
I'll never love again
Years will teach me the foolish blasphemy
Of cursing my father
And when they buried him in the ground
I sensed he knew
How to play the scape goat
It wasn't him I really hated
But he bore that burden until I figured it out
Long before they lowered him down
I knew my love for him was eternal
That he would carry it with him wherever he went
And if I didn't die in bed that day
A good part of me did
Of this I'm certain
I won't say "the best part"
I still have strengths
But I'm always wondering
The kind of man I would be
With one less bible in the house
And my mother playing Farkle with me

Slowly a sense of purpose returns
And hovers just out of reach
Shrouded in the darkness of this womb
Encrypted and encoded to the point
I may never decipher the meaning
So that my destiny is to invent new ways
Of keeping the disappointment from being devastating
Like it was the last time
And the time before that
And the time before that
And especially the time before that
To live on the hope of love in the next life
Knowing full well any love I experience
Given or taken
Is sheilded and corrupt
Through no fault of my own
It was purged along with my youth
By circumstances
Beyond my control