Letter to You from Freud & Pavlov
You’re in love with your mother. That makes 2 of us. Together
we watch the violin of her body shave kernels of gold
off a cob, lather them in butter, salt & pepper the whole fortune
until a slow music floods our eyes. We’re like dogs, sad
& pining, our silence the only language we’ve ever believed
in. I want you to know she is younger than you will ever be.
How her hair nests tropical birds, how the metronome of her
breathing with you on her chest predates time. You will learn
some things about her no one else will ever know. You will forgive
yourself the thoughts of inflicting danger. You will tear us apart
& glue us together & I will never hesitate to look down the hallway
of your mind & fill it with a promise thrown on the floor like a bag of ice.
Letter to Time Unknown
I walk around town looking for interesting stones, river
shrapnel, anything seminatural I can convince you someday
is supernatural. I want to take an arrowhead & carve
the small watermelon of you out of your mother’s belly.
We’re going to kill each other in the kitchen, the hospital,
& it will be your fault. Know this now: I consider you
a threat. But it takes two to tango, kiddo, & a dozen plus
years from now when I receive a call from Officer Horse Breath
about the egged house or knifed truck tires, I will swear
on her life that you were by my side, at home, building a UFO
from little relics found in a shoebox in the garage from time unknown.
Letter to Hindsight in 2020
We played the conception game like we were in the middle
of a hurricane. Ate bananas for dinner, went full bonobo.
We dreamt our tiny apartment was an island, tip-toed around
the lava kitchen tiles, drew a waterfall out of the clawfoot.
There were moments we wanted it all to end. For this to be
our awakening, our silence, an opera with a machine gun
in its mouth. But we wanted you, too, not knowing who you
were: your strawberry pigtails, the microcosmic laugh that can grab
a human heart & rip it like a phonebook in half. We could feel
a presence better than us, finally, until it became us. Your little spit-ups,
toes the size of orange Tic-Tacs, a distraction into another world.
Truth is we might have killed you by imagining you. Some days
now we wake up, hot skin tea-kettling hot skin, & the fire
goes eyeball white, blank as an EKG, the idea of the moment
somehow always greater than the moment the ember floats away.
