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Without Wings
F.X. MacKenzie I cannot protect you… My wings burned off in the re-entry… Most days I doubt They were ever there at all…. Your bellowing bizarre beast-mother Married above her station. (The how and why we may never know-- Perhaps he had some Humbertian designs But was never around to do more than construct the framework.) You were set down amongst the happy day-campers, Transplanted into the sterile soil of button-down blasé ivy-climbers. They expected you to bloom in those formal gardens Which had no place in the layout for A wildflower such as you. When the pool was not deep enough, Unruly weed that you were, you wandered South to the motherland, The dwelling of the remnants of the beast-tribe. Given a room in some distant relative's house, You saw that this too was no place to put down roots: The university was overrun with keg-heavy footballers; The professors gave opaque speeches in dead languages To students who slept or snickered or socialized covertly. On Veteran's Day you went back to your room to find Your fugitive uncle had moved himself in With all his underworldly possessions: The rusted car parts, the empty bottles, The thousand plagues of pestilence, The unwashed laundry, the dog and child, The guns he couldn't see straight enough to shoot…. You wept tears for that poor delusional priest Who counseled you that God was in every one of us. Living from car to library You adopted the keeper of the card catalog and the book shelver As surrogate kinsmen, Made a home of the hollows behind the stacks, An altar of the study table, A sacrament of the living words…. Maybe you began to create your own savior Who would rise from the depths of your subconscious…. Would that wild doctor full of cocaine Be as enchanted with you as I have become? Perhaps--but he would dissect your brain like a butterfly; I would swallow you whole-- Bones, salt, soul and all. To keep those nightmares from you, I would wrap you in my own skin… But I am hounded by love and death, Outfoxed by the vagaries of mind… And without wings, This baptism may become A drowning. © Copyright 2004 by F.X. MacKenzie |