DADZ KLUBB (NE1 CAN JOIN)

i don't want to think about my dad
as he sits alone in that house in connecticut
burning old receipts
boxes of them
when he doesn't know why he kept them in the first place
and calling me
to ask if i want to keep my dusty, water-warped artwork from third grade
when my brother doesn't come home much
and sleeps through most of thanksgiving day
in the guest room downstairs
because he doesn't want dad to know how late he got in
the landing creaks on the way up

how often does my dad call my grandparents
who are dying an ocean away
and i don't want to think
how bitter bitter bitter my granddad sounds
when he talks about the electricity board
and never talks about why he changed our family name

if the bank forecloses on a man's house
and his wife leaves him finally
and he doesn't have a job
and his son gets ready to go off to college
and his little girl is a grown up who can't remember to phone home
like she's trying to look at the sun
but instead has to look to the side of it
then
what is a man?

"i stopped paying the mortgage last august"
he says in july
i'm screaming
"why didn't you say anything? why do you never say?"
"you're old man owes 60 thou for your schooling"
"there are so many times you could have told me"
but he's the first person i call a month later
to say
"i'm nothing nothing nothing at all"
he knows
"people have been telling you what do to do you whole life"
at 22 minutes
i think it's the longest conversation we've ever had

i hope that house was fucking worth it, you ass

oh sink me,
the child wanders out of Idyll
a tree-lined ferme ornee, manufacturing young ladies
does not make for solid ground when relegated to memory
how ancient the thought that one could always be In Uniform
married this year to this canonical text and next year to that
and the once springy ground, mossy and leaf strewn and musky
that heaved back at the step of her lined calves
which were all tennis tennis tennis
proves now to be a sinkhole
and she finds as she tumbles into the pit
not Virgil
not even Cicero, Lugubrious and hand outstretched
no Elysium alongside a pond
not even an eerie moor and a big black dog
just an endless plane of muck and more muck
unpopulated and reaking, Grendel's fen
which squelches underneath her sneakers
and to distract herself she looks at the sky

the twinkle twinkle works its magic on the hardest of hearts

how strange! an occultist borne from the shucked skin of an Enlightenment size-queen.
though if soap actors can become consciousness freaks
and groomed conservative child-kings end up writing for Canadian Zine-Empires
then perhaps not so strange
and now believing:
each human body giving off a certain frequency
music working only when it resonates in the body
hitting some strange inverse or opposite
and
spirit guides like saints but with much less strenuous standards for beatification
calling upon the dead for strength
in any foxhole
especially those with dirty lipstick red mouths
each one for each purpose
and
Charlotte Bronte's notion of strings
broken ribs strewn all over the place
the dust of bones ground under our feet blanketing the world
and
THE UNNAMED AND UNNAMEABLE
the ache that will always be and always taunt
the whispering thing, "yes I am here, I am here, come home"
and
emotional vampires/energy sucks/soul killers
split souls and lies so perfectly opposite to each other to cancel out
and
liberal rage as being so lame
and
language not needing to be preserved but fucked
in the nicest sense
tongued and licked and rolled
and
CLOWNS!

which is to say
belief can be so pure and flat and white and smooth
and explode of all a sudden into something else entirely
the shapely, gentlemanly hands of history
can slide off your neck and you can breathe