UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOHN TUSTIN AN UNDELIBERATE POEM I almost never write a slow and deliberate poem and tonight will be no exception. Snow covers the shivering city like a disrespectful goodnight. My boy is having some bad days. Mommy and Daddy’s mutual hatred and disgust has worn him down like a boxer’s fists. Coffee in the morning from Utopia Bagels is perfect for New York winter days like this. Worth the drive. I’ve lost track of how many Christmases my mother’s been gone. Four? Sometimes the first slug of Sam Adams tastes like the metal cap and tonight that was what happened. By the third I won’t notice. I lie in my bed with my arms wrapped around my daughter and we can feel the other one breathing and she is as contented with this as I am but that will end. The wind rattles the bathroom window as I clip the errant spider-hairs of my eyebrows, squinting in my mirror like a fey Clint Eastwood, waiting for the Muslim extremists I am increasingly certain will come through the window because I’m Christian and their mother is Muslim and they won’t tolerate that, they want my kids. There is no cigarette dangling from my lips because I don’t smoke. SNIPPED I have been snipped from your photographs. I have been excised from your thoughts. I’m not in there at all. But you’re floating at the bottom of the beer bottle in this room with the hate and the froth and the dead mosquito and the soaked crumbs. Here’s a photo from 1987. There’s Joe, there’s Steve, there’s Lisa. But not me. But I was there, I know I was. Young and lithe and jangling legs and quaking hormones. And you were there, I saw you. We talked about Black Sabbath, David Bowie and Jim Carroll. Now you cry and you laugh and you live and make a baby and go to work and eat lunch and masturbate in the bathroom with the door locked and sleep a dreamed sleep. And I do a composite of those things, too. But I do them with a small piece of you banging around in my skull like shrapnel. Hate me. Grow indifferent with age. But don’t forget me. I’m still here. And I was there. John Tustin has two perfect children and a cat that acts like a dog. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry is a link to his poetry online. |
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