For a long time I’d been
straddling a high peak,
One foot on solid ground, the other
bare and slipping on the opposite *****.

But lately I've had both feet
on the slippery side,
hands firmly grasping the peak,
feet spread out below me
spinning and churning, unable
to gather a foothold.

Though I believe I could hold on forever
I fear of eternity in this state.

I wonder what's the point?

Perhaps to not hurt those who
would be hurt by my letting go.

Or perhaps the hope that
all will be well in due time,
I’ve been trained to believe it.

30 years of scored and numbered ovals and oblongs,
constantly enumerated and venerated,
my little saints are prayers on a candied rosary.

30 years aware of where they are and
when they'd be mine.
No rest with or without.
Nothing will quiet their screaming.

so I walk
and walk some more
at all hours of the night.
The neighborhood dogs know me well,
they no longer bark at me for  
I am one of them now,
resigned to pacing fence lines in the dark.

Back home at 3am I stare at the ceiling,
legs spinning and churning,
clawing for the high peak.

When will it pass?
When will it pass?

Tennyson wrote,  "It is better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all",

though I don't think he actually believed it

and neither do I.

The blue is the middle.
The battle.
The anti coherent existence.

I’m supposed to watch it from a distance,
separate myself through persistence.

I am unable.

The Blue is my watershed, and loud,
Red left and Green right war at the peak
while the pull from the left is strong.
A rolling storm cloud thick from behind,
I look toward the Green, for the light,
to your face, and the reflection in
your eyes tells me what I already know.

It is gaining.
I cannot escape it.

A tidal wave,
an avalanche,
the day before the flu.
The first pang of a kidney stone.
That moment between banging
your knee on a desk and the arrival
of the pain.

A slight delay but
most definitely inevitable.

I am not supposed to be IT.

The darkness is its own entity.

IT
is of itself and not me,

But it tells me it is me
and it is quite convincing.

Without further progress
I am convinced I'll need an exorcism.

In the summer when I was 10
I won my first trophy,
a time when kids earned them
and others went without.

I cradled it in my hands like
the corpse of a baby rabbit,
my sweaty palms staining
the corrugated copper torso.

Father drove us home
in an overwhelming silence
while I sat in the back
with my trophy,
thinking about how
Paul's father twirled
him about in celebration.

I'd never seen a father
hug a son before,
it was strange and alien
in the world I knew,

hell I'd never seen
a mother hug a son,
or even a father hug
a mother for that matter.

The years would bring
many more trophies
and much more silence,

all of which now fills
a worn and tattered
box in my garage,

but leaves me with a
smothering emptiness
whenever I wonder why
I'm so terrified of
being loved.

She told me to
"Imagine a safe place",
a quiet place, somewhere to go
when the fog is at my feet.

But everywhere I went was
crowded with doubt
and a lingering loitering
presence on my shoulder,
come out from the fog to
hurl accusations and taunt.

I can only assume
it's a he on my shoulder,
an enigma,
my father's doppelganger
come to dredge my mind
of all the **** he dished out
when I was a child,

and feed it back to me again.


I tell her I'll need more tools
and stronger ideas.

So she gives me a seat at
the head of the table
where my ****** committee meets,
and a gavel to establish order
or bash in their brains.

She arms my dreams
with weapons and courage,
gives me REM when I'm wide awake.

We fashion a furnace of love,
hot enough to vaporize the
cold darkness pouring into my gut,
customized with levers and pulleys
to push and to pull in the fight.

We tally
Alpha and Beta waves,
trained and retrained,
hard coded messages
sanded smooth by repetition.

       Through it all I give too,
       and what I give is all I can give,
       it is the warmth of what enslaves me,
       and the thought of letting it go….  
       Well.... lets not go there right now.

In the long run I'm not sure that
any of it will be enough,
I am weakened by the war.

But occasionally there
are shiny spots that simmer,

You see,
I may have found that place,
the place she first told me to find
way back at the beginning,
the place to feel safe, although
it isn't really a place per se.

If it were true
I could finally ascend to
where no fog can go.
Where my father's voice
cannot be heard,
nor the ghosts I grew
up with.

A place of love and honesty,
where my furnace would sit idle in awe.

There is a picture of us
on our bedroom wall.
It is the perfect depiction of
all that is safe for me.

I look at your smile
and I see peace.
Nothing can penetrate
your radiance,
you are everything
I've never had,
double layered and
impenetrable
by all of it.

By all of the ****.

I am learning to go there
when the fog is at my feet,
and the ghosts are in my ear.

When the accusations come
I can escape there with you,

and together we can drown them out

if only for a little while.

The nurse said he
seemed confused today,
with a faraway look as
if trying to remember…

But I know the
look she speaks of,
he's in a constant state
of panic and despair,  

as if he’s just missed the
train and now he knows
there won’t be enough time
To catch the next one and still
make it to the liquor store
before it closes.

In those first years
we spent a lot of time
in red corduroy chairs,
the ones that came with
the house on Turner Terrace.

I would sit and watch you
when you didn’t know
I was watching, constantly
looking for a crack in
your armor,
for a little snippet of the
***** you might become,

but I never found it
and it never happened.

Your little girl wonder
had me convinced that
the world in your hands
would be safe,

no death blows,
no mean streaks,
love's foundation set deep
never to be undone by
head games or hidden agendas,

and now all these years later
I am still transfixed by
your clarity,
your complete “sheerness”.

You are my priceless
dividend of peace finally paid
from a lifetime investment
in Faith,

you came to me
when Hope had gone
and Grace was silent,

and you love me
when you don’t even know it.

I can't stand the smell of mutton,
or the texture of liver, especially
after extended time on a dinner plate,

which meant we spent extended
time around an oval table,
my sisters and I with our
heads down, eyes averted,
no sound but the chatter of silverware.

I remember my cousin Scott told me one time
he put spaghetti in his pockets because he didn’t like
the way it felt in his mouth, he said he’d stuffed it down
and pulled it out later and flushed it down the toilet.
It made me wonder how his pants must have smelled,
but It was something I could never risk because
my uncle wasn’t a drinker, but my father was.

As the youngest of 5 I was
the only boy, and mother said
it was a privilege for me to sit
at the right hand of father,
a place of honor she said,

perhaps in other households.

For me it was a prison,
a daily nightmare of the unknown,
I spent forever in that chair
and was always the last to leave the table,  
constantly burdened by congealed meat and organs.

Begging was useless, reprieve was never given.

On a random summer night
when I was 8 years old
my father announced with disgust,

“You eat like a bird!”

It was the way he dragged out the word
“B i i i i r r d”, so distinct, as if
he could no longer contain his abhorrence,

and once the restraint was broken
his words came fast and hot,
berating me for my
non-existent appetite.

He would have done well to
understand that fear suppresses hunger,
that alcoholism doesn't
allow for compassion or civility,
and when you live with a demon
its not you who’s in control.

I wept,
and his devil burned with rage.

“You are pathetic!” he screamed.

More tears
and then my sisters joined
in a chorus of muffles,

heads bowed,
we endured his wrath with no thought
of engaging or protesting.

Eventually I heard the screen door slam
and one by one my sisters abandoned the table,
escaping to who knows where.

I kept my head down for years.

When I finally looked up I was alone.

The girls were gone and father was off
to drink beer in his air conditioned room,

and mother?  

I have no idea where she went.