--BUT WHAT HAPPENS AFTERWARD?  ISN’T THAT IMPORTANT, TOO?

…I think I’ve finally overcome the funk I’ve been in for a few weeks now.  I’ve been writing finally, writing lots of dark poetry that feels like journaling. 

It’s helping…

Ignoring the Monster

Let’s not talk about broken rainbows or

the bruises around our daughter’s eye sockets,

the man/the monster she’s chosen over us,

his hoarfrost breath

bleeding hairy fog

across his cereal bowl

this morning

while the house is as still as stone

yet trembling inside its bones,

you on your way to a deposition in Great Falls,

me afraid,

afraid of myself

and the monster,

together and separate,

fearful of damage that cannot be revealed by skin alone.

Instead let’s pile dishes into the sink,

rinse and swirl blue milk down the drain,

dry our hands on a white towel,

kiss our once-little girl on the cheek,

nod goodbye to the monster without making eye contact,

collect our things,

collect ourselves,

and start another day fresh.

At Any Given Moment

I lived with monsters once,

not knowing for sure if I was one myself,

not knowing which of us would be the preferred target

at any given moment

because danger can be seductive

and sporadic.

There were times when

I saw curls of fur

waft in the air

after an assault

on one of my siblings,

Dad’s sweat spackling the basement floor,

screams banging off the ceiling like wailing sirens,

a black-tongued leather belt lashing the air and skin

on skin

again and again

until I bawled like a newborn

with no breath to take.

An accessory is what I was then,

made into a monster nonetheless,

because the blood of a monster was the

blood that broiled inside of me.

Oh, but that was a lifetime ago.

Tonight at the dinner table,

two months removed from the funeral,

I finger a tuft of fur

inside the well of my pants pocket

beneath the dinner table,

thumb and forefinger working the monster’s fur as if coaxing out a genie

or starting a Boy Scout fire by hand.

I fork scalloped potatoes across my plate in muddy, taupe smears.

I clip four wilted peas diagonally on all four tines

and slur a gaudy self-portrait over the dish.

My wife asks why I’m so quiet lately.

She yawns but says

I really need to open up,

that talking often helps.

She says, “Memories are frail flags.”

Then adds,

“I t probably wasn’t half as bad as

you think.”

Mommy Issues

If all the bad men in my life

got together in a single room

they would resemble a woman

who looked precisely like my mother.

She’s been dead for years now

yet she keeps showing up

in the smirks and smears,

the croaky cigarette coughing

of men bent on anger

and destruction,

baring bad wrist tattoos

and knuckle hair gleaming like black spires under the lamplight,

deer guts glinting purple-black off their skin.

A therapist might have a solution.

“Oedipus,” he’d say.

“You were simply in love with your mother.

I see that a lot, especially in men your age.”

But how wrong he’d be.

How wrong.

The Duty of Memory

One last time to remember K-Mart

and stealing squirt guns we’d never stock with bullets,

Dolly Parton and Buck Owens warbling

some kind of honky-tonk over steel guitar

while cigarette smoke wafted like steel wool clouds in the car

as Dad drove drunk around every winding curve the night

we were to pick up my brother from prison.

One last time to remember that tooth ripping punch,

the one that brought blazing sirens to our trailer park,

cops and EMT’s,

while inside we went at it nonplussed,

brother-to-brother---

Chinese torture,

Three-Quarter Nelson’s,

brass knuckles to the groin.

One last time to remember running away,

house fires,

garage fires

and kneeling on rocks in a corner with our hands up,

praying we could hold the stance for sixty minutes,

sixty minutes or else.

Tonight the will is executed,

legally expired,

and with it

all those scorpions

that have been tunneling inside for years,

finally relenting,

releasing me

from the

brutal duty of memory.

What Makes You a Man

It all comes back in black and white,

the same as our old TV,

the one with the fake, wooden frame

and nobs as big as flapjacks,

someone’s blood on the paneling that could be coaxed off with a rag.

an arrow shot through the window above the kitchen sink,

eating canned army rations like some ragged, alley cat,

Dad saying quite deliberately,

 “Eat up, you little fucker.

This is it.

This is what makes you a man.”