Thirty Two Years I'm built like a burlap sack full of mongrel pups. Too bad the arroyo is dry I live in a stucco mudpile where the kitchen linoleum peels up like iguana skin. I wanted wicker and stained glass. Too fragile for the lions that roar on my savannah. I can drink and curse most men unconcious. I'm nothing like that drunken S.O.B. you married Whose every nasty habit crawls out of my skin unbidden. So unlike your high school sweetie. How amazing that genes can lie.
I sing seventies soul in the shower. Cry poetry in twilight This tenor voiced soprano warms with age. When I'm forty I'll sing like Tina Turner. WishI was black so I'd have legs like that. I wanted a spotlight.
Drowning in a testosterone saturated puddle Of synchronized farting, moco noses And hot wheels sprouting from the carpet I nurture till it hurts Yes, you can raise tadpoles in the baby pool Say "please and thank you". Blow that nose in your tissue not your sleeve. I love you, I'm so proud you can count to infinity. Your eyes are bluer You'll be taller You're smarter than I was at your age.
Mama, you never let me be better than you Ten fingers and toes, all you said you wanted - wasn't enough to make you whole. I am a bogle in your basement What color is the bad sheep when she's the only one? A faded white reminder of your own failures Captured in those curling Kodak moments Your lithe arms draped over me Your eyes focused on the Guy du Jour Never felt my own small heart beating Above the thunder of your own. My mouth full of lava soap and spaghettios Never able to question your omnipotence.
You still shriek in my dreams, Mama. A jade eyed banshee screaming for a soul I cannot give you. I never close my eyes.
I kiss my boys damp curls while they sleep One tousled froth of lemon merangue One butterscotch sweet against my lips. Perfect love. I wonder if you ever felt that ache in your heart for me? As you yanked that wire brush through my bristley mane Or smacked my young *** with it? Give me one more chance to nuzzle against you And look up into eyes as bright as new leaves. Let me see myself as a perfect reflection of you. In my heart, we are whole...
TL Boehm 3/18/98
I wrote this in 1998 - for my mother who was born with congenital birth defects - and told by her father that she could not have been his child...She repeated the horror on me telling me in 1993 that I was not MY father's child. She is most definitely the offspring of her father..but as for me...I will never know the truth. and so a part of ME is incomplete