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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY - 10/2012
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JOHN DORSEY Masculinity as kids we never really understood the power of that phrase virginity, like a strong drink still frozen on our tongues a time tested truth when we were 10 yrs old molestation seemed like some invisible baseball metaphor coined by the ghost of steve mcqueen as i sit here now in a friend's kitchen i wonder where it all went wrong kris and i used to talk about girls heaven in flower patterned dresses blowing in fields of dandelions without the benefit of one sex ed class kris, who was named after kristofferson whose parents met in the same strip club where we got our first beer back in middle school his mother dancing to the moonlight for a few dollars and a little hope on a sunday morning coming down from the night before kris, whose father wore an eye patch while building computers in the upstairs bedroom of his grandmother’s house while masturbating to 70’s porn on beta that he’d let us borrow if we promised to be quiet we used to have pool parties on our birthdays & look up at the stars in the sky for guidance we used to wander through lunch lines clutching our milk money wiping the sweat from george washington's empty promises without ever once thinking about heavy things like self worth kris, who was the first guy i knew to “go all the way” it didn’t make any difference that it was with his mom back then a boner was a sacred thing and poole and i just asked him what it felt like to be a man he said, “sticky” and bragged about it for the next 2 or 3 years while we dreamt about cheerleaders and bookish girls with black rimmed glasses and just getting to second base in our clubhouse in poole’s backyard nothing seemed wrong then we were kids who dreamt about a lot of things none of them sad things like fast cars & kissing with our eyes closed come prom night whatever that was it was in the distant future things like honor, like brotherhood, like family we were going to make it out of that small pennsylvania town together but in my heart we’re still there still 10 yrs old still waiting for our dreams to come true sitting here now i can still remember the indents of stripper polls in the carpet at the bar when we went back to town a few years after i served as best man at kris’s wedding to the wrong girl just because he wanted to know what it felt like to have a normal family what it felt like to truly be a man the truth is something tells me that the skeletons in our closets will be 10 yrs old forever and that they will be anything but masculine. Requiem for a gambler for Gene Bloom and S.A. Griffin These days the ink comes out like blood like dreams invisible a lighter shade of pale. Someone said, "You like to write ghost poems." That isn't it The only time I hear music now is on the puckered lips of gravedancers ghosts don't want to be anywhere near me they look at me like I fingered their sister at the prom in another life. We're floating in shit and drowning in miracles. The human body is 98% metaphors and 2% nightmares. So it just seems cliche to bet on anything with longer odds. |
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