bicentennial christmas

A stone drunk Santa

slow jams through our home,

his long white beard

reduced to patchy stubble,

rosy cheeks

gone yellow & hollow,

chubby physique

now stick figure thin.

Dad's lifelong passion for oblivion

once curtailed at Christmas

in deference to us kids

could no longer be,

such balance now beyond his grasp,

chased away by the ghosts of cirrhosis

gnawing at his liver.

This last Deck The Halls,

sipping Cream of Kentucky

libations through a straw,

when even prayers to the porcelain

or the rug or the sink

are unable in the end to stave off the slab

and a date with a toe tag

come the swelter of August.

goodwill sunflowers (van gogh on the cheap)

the pale green plaster walls crack

to a nicotine ceiling sadly

coughing up our acrid interior

hazy through their shroud of putrid.

--

a thrift store van gogh muses

from his living room perch on high,

they lie catty corner to one another

in fading upholstered coffins

numb to vincent's goodwill sunflowers.

--

sick, smokes, and delirium

and never ending bargain basement booze

flow by the hand-me-down television

tuned to unwatched watergate hearings

whose treachery can't be bothered

in this netherworld of ours.

Booze Battered Lineage

I feel the weight of the weird

and the strength of sad weaklings

as I crawl through the alleys

of childhood dreams.

----


I arise to the noises

of garbagemen retching

and I yearn to be trashed

until numb to the numbskull I've been and become.

----

Yesterday's misery

is mailed to tomorrow

as time disappoints me

once and again.

----

I'm malaise bloomed incarnate

in Kafkaesque shit storms,

drenched in digestion

of booze battered lineage.

----

I'm swamped in the ethos

of failed adolescence,

bathed in the strychnine

of putting up appearances.

----

I'm the muck that I'm stuck in,

cut on shiny shards of family

through the thick shag of sick

and the avocado bygones

of disco sad psychosis,

shot past present tenses

that haunt all my tomorrows

like an out of style spectre

cursed with everlasting shame.

A moment Saturday in 1970

Mom is gardening

in the summer sun out back,

smoking and probing

at what might one day be lettuce or parsley.




Inside, Dad's head bleeds sweat

through the couch cushions,

sweet stained remnants

of endless bourbon daydreams.




I am manning a lemonade stand

in the yard out front,

earning some coin

from kindhearted strangers,

though perhaps I'm the one drinking the Kool-Aid.



Sis is away with friends

trying to blot out homestead time bombs,

a normal teenage girl

trapped in the body of familial dysfunction,

trapped in the bailiwick of parental decay.


We are all in our own place,

frozen in a fevered fear of fate

not yet written but already carved in stone.

The Ol' Neighborhood (Plum Crazy)

Summer, 1970.

Violent trees of violet plums

stand guard over our homes

'tween the sidewalk and the street

of my childhood hallucinations.

I climb into the branches of our digestive majesty

and survey the neighborhood's blossoming decay:

Look, there's a pickled Arlene Warfield three doors down

making quiet sick into her flower bed with grace.

Look, here's my father clumsy fumbling toward the curb

'neath my purple camouflaged catbird seat

before mounting his trusty Mercury Comet,

the sonic blast of mufferless combustion

signifying another cattle drive underway

'cross suburban prairies to liquor store ecstasy.

Dad, the shakiest gun in the (North) West.

Dad, slow drawing double barreled bourbon.

Dad, outmatched by six shooter cirrhosis.

---

I pick off a plum and suck out the pulp,

amusing myself with malignant metaphors

drifting nowhere and serving scant purpose

until nature absconds me to the ground,

rushing my ass toward the family confessional

that is our only and blessed toilet.

I learned, that day, two stark truisms

which have never wavered through time and tribulation:

human beings can be quite dead while busy living

and plums are simply prunes in hydrating disguise.