what if this is the real world?
what if you are the ghost?
what if it is your own child
you see in the sudden picture
on the other side of the scrim
Holding
worlds both together and apart
You do the math when
you see her–how old she
was, is, will be
If she makes it that far
Refrain in your head thudding
like fists on plate glass
because you are the ghost
voice thin and impossible
just the other side of glass
as you watch her slowly
slip away.
Knowing how uncomfortable you get when I jaw on about the abuse issue, I have decided to redact it for you, using a host of hip and bipartisan global and political crises in place of all the words for felonies against children.
So here’s the story. Redacted for your comfort, of course-
When we were still young we fostered then adopted two children who were already diagnosed with global warming and national debt by the time we met them.
In fact, they had so many problems they had already fired dozens of US attorneys as was customary at the beginning of a new administration.
We were told to be consistent and disciplined. We were told this would help…
Perhaps it did. Could what they did have been worse? Pacific-Ocean-vortex-of-trash worse?
Maybe.
But as it happened, when their younger siblings were still quite young, Charles DOB 2/17/94, was caught Ponzi-scheming and coyoting his little sisters. For years-quite systematically -in the places ordinary people went to push down their risk of type 2 diabetes-football stadium, tennis court, high school pole-vault mat.
He had taught the little ones expensive border walls were necessary to keep bad hombres out.
Only as it turned out, he was the baddest of the hombres.
He taught them universal health care with a single payer system would bankrupt them while at the same time using the machinations of federal agencies (such as the IRS) to bully or intimidate them into keeping quiet.
He bussed technically deceased persons across county lines to vote for the candidate of his choice (him, unsurprisingly).
More victims than fingers on his own pale, freckled, meaty hands.
Until one day, way too late, he was caught, and the truth all came tumbling out–
The lies
The bleached coral reefs
Lost, extinct, and endangered species
Poor afflicted pollinators
Thick winter smog trapped in Alpine valleys and obscuring Beijing’s winter sun
Our staggering national debt…
All under the foolish, trusting, naive noses of his legal guardians, people who had mostly always believed in the electoral college. Believed in a bicameral congress, Founding Fathers, and law-and-order presidents.
The aftermath was crippling. The survivors found themselves in the usual need for puppies, s’mores, and a celebrity rant or two (at an award ceremony here or there).
Instead they went to court, called elected officials, petitioned the government, and wrote about it.
Only to find that all those used plastic toothbrushes swirling in the sea can really make a nice person nervous. As if all that swirling detritus far out to sea were a contagious kind of broken.
Our kind of broken–redacted, parochial, muted somehow.
Placeholders for tragedy.
somewhere in the bowels of the NIH there are tiny, fragile pig-children
Spun from the DNA of “us” and “them”
Which reminds me of a story—
Once there were these two guys
Who let iterations and outlines of darkness
Into every corner of their very own souls
(Whatever that is, right?)
Only to find their place among the dead
Until…
Love walked in
Dispelled the ghosts of men into the
Real and understandably alarmed
Sea of pigs
Who then chose death over the dark wraiths of men
Sometimes I ask myself
What happened to those panicked pigs?
Did they find the eternal?
And what about these new unconsenting
children of a lonely room
Half-pig, half-child
Will they be allowed to
Escape the grave
And, with no help from their human side
Find rest for their weary souls
What are you doing up so late, little one?
Awake among the Petri dishes
No place for children
Where is your mother? Your father?
Do you mean to tell me
These nice-looking men in lab coats
Are the only parents you know
As your filigree DNA unfolds they peer
Into this sterile womb
Strain to catch a glimpse of
Your nascent primitive streak
Unwilling to admit it is theirs
We all fear
Tell the inhabitants of this broke-down place
new sheriff in town…
who so resembles the
wise child posed
Years ago in a picture
Beneath this ink-blue-night-sky sombrero,
Clark Gable mustache, glint of forever in your eyes
As this endless tide rakes an uneven shore
As words fail to form the adequate cup for sorrow
You go on-
Unstoppable heart.
Boy with the unstoppable
Heart.
So close
to a reclusive keeper
of memories, of wrongs
Shuffling among the forgotten objects
Placeholders for the barely living:
anonymous empty
water bottles, hollow and crumpled
Become the jury
Old newspapers still swaddled in
Their plastic rain protectors
Told to be
Witnesses or spectators
Instructed to rise
As a one-armed nutcracker assumes the bench
Rag doll court reporter records the proceedings
Mr. Vinegar prosecutes while
the defense attorney was appointed from among the
A pantheon of generic
Happy Meal toys.
But the victims are living songbirds
Twittering in the disheveled
cage of my heart of course
Always re-animating dried bones-
Off-kilter, neglected, wrongs
Will inexorably be
Radically, fundamentally transformed
When the true King
Calls them back
To life
in the space of no more than
Half-an-hour
someone steals his little shoes
dear to him/dear to us
Still, just shoes.
At the scene of the crime we
Call their names
Thinking whoever did this has to love them
Must have loved them
Oh. This song I know the words by heart
Sang it all those years ago
With all the other sodden
Unbearable
Break up songs for babies.
somewhere floating in the ether of souls there is
another us
Without the inevitable entrapment of self-preservation
-The pig mom and the human child
I use my truncated vocal apparatus
to try to warn you you are
– not safe here
among the scientists
With their crisp white coats and syllogistic rejoinders
They count pieces of us
Placing animal in one
category
and the human in another
Bone-bone-bone-
Spleen-heart-cornea-
Never question whether we can
see color or
Feel pain
Confined instead to
Diminished souls jarred by
All the words for
monster
She folds the old court room,
kangaroo judge, too-
chatty DA,
disembodied victim’s advocate
Into a single square of
pressed paper
Mama’s voice cracks over the
willful substitution
rendering mandatory sentences into a
Chain of paper doll victims
flattened easily
Into origami anger
….funny hats to
fragile sodden boats
hit by each percussive wave of
Shouldn’t-‘ve-been
Shouldn’t-ever-have-been
Done-to-us folds
Voice in your head
Kinda sounds like you but…
Kinder, wiser, more forgiving
Bright penny on the ground
In the most unlikely places
A posse of leaves long wrung from living limbs
Dance, alive in the winter wind
Sing your name
No matter
A big impossible
Promise unless it is Truth
Kind that sets a body free
Not unlike those ephemeral leaves
Dry bones
Bits of things found
In the unlikeliest places
Love will find you
No matter what.
Carrying Light 