Sweet Child

Not competitor, not utility, sweet child of mine.Love has no object.The peacock spider, I never heard of it,this Wonder, this Marvel,I never heard of it before.The rhino fish, I never heard of it before.The ape hound, I never heard of it,the coon cat, the grass fly.

Not advisor, not saboteur, sweet child of mine.Love fixes no role, makes no guarantee.The wolf man, I heard of him,his uncontrollable change,like when Mom transformed at lunch,under her fast-turning metamorphic spell.Feel guilty, feel angry, feel shameful, feel rage-ful,collapse on linoleum.I hand her her pocketbook,coax her to find the money she'd promisedas she cried on the floor.It was the hundredth time, and a hundred times more terrible,but I need that quarter Mom!The kids are stopping at Carl’s for football cards after school.

Not quizzing everything but in solution with it all.Not combinator, not divisor: container that pocketsan anomaly. The singular contains the divisible,like a silver coin exploding pennies.The glove mouse, I never heard of it.The dance-foot-arch-face, its yearning for sex.The climbing bat, the whip-tail deer,I never heard of it.Not desire, not want neutralized, sweet child of mine.Can love exist without desire? Without revulsion?The bottle-broke goat, the rusty-touch rat,I never heard of it before.

While Dad napped on the loungethat folded and nipped my fingers if I'm careless,I snuck a drink from his beer.He’d dropped his cigarette butt in the can,in the swill at the bottomof his Schaefer. Dad's Pall-Mall ashes:I didn’t know, I just saw the grown-up beer can, my sleeping father.I slurped it in, the butt a shocking mass like when you’d swallow an ice cube,gray ash paste spreading cancer in my throat.I wanted to wake him and tell him I’m sorry,I’m gonna die from cancer poison,because I broke the rule and was a sneak,that afternoon beside my sleeping father in terror of death