Tag: Autobiography

i learned to read when i was three years old
from cereal boxes, riding in a grocery cart

when my mom would lift me into or out of the cart,
that would be the only time all week
anyone in the family would touch me

in the family i grew up in, we
didn’t touch each other much
or tell each other much that
actually mattered much

my parents were never cruel
never neglectful
just
reticent
never touching us, or,
each other —
at least where we saw them

i never knew what they were feeling
because they didn’t say

so

i learned to read

to read feelings, to figure out when
people were sad or angry or
anything else without them
actually telling me

it’s not a very exact science
but
i’ve been a practitioner to this day

and as for never being touched:

when you are never touched,
if i am any representative,
you may not feel hated, but
you feel
hateworthy

or maybe

loveunworthy

hungover, and a little sick,
pulled over on a stretch of road,
and thought about the night i’d lost
and why life seems so hard

and was i meant to always be
alone and drinking just to live,
and why nobody fancied me
while all my friends got married

i got out of the car, and heard
across the way a barking dog
protecting what he knew was his
from me, a distant stranger

and thought my focus maybe wrong
to concentrate on what i lacked
instead of maybe changing things
and stretching

the seven of us at the beach
and dancing days like music played
from our top 40 radio
and no place else to go

the girls walked by in twos and threes
but not too many looked our way,
another wave will always come:
the callback in a dancing day

the smell of lotion, salt and spray,
and everything you’d want but shade,
the tunes the laughter and the light
of dancing days that never

fade

how do you get back to a place
you’ve never been?
how do you find something inside yourself
that’s never really been there?

across the empty diamond,
a breeze was blowing, gentle and serene.
the day was one of roaming
and wondering at the autumn i had seen —

then, sounding like my father,
a voice said “keep your promises, be true:
for men are good for nothing,
unless the things they say match what they do.”

the struggle’s real, and pressing,
the choice between the ideal and the urge —
no emptiness so deep
integrity, abandoned

in the search