30 years ago today…

I wrote this many years ago, updated it just now for my age. It’ll be in the new chapbook, its first time in print.

Peppermint Schnapps

August 16, 1977:
it was pissing rain the night
Elvis Presley died

I want the night back anyway

the way I want the switchblade back I threw in Thompson Pond that night
that German switchblade with the brass shoulders and ebony scales
I want it clean I want it shiny and I want the tip to be back to the way it was
before Henry Gifford snapped it off trying to work it out of the floor
after we’d played drunken chicken for an hour or so
I tossed it in anger as far out into the water as I could
and then I hit Henry Gifford in the mouth when he called me a stupid fuck
for tossing such a beautiful knife so far away
and even after he apologized I hit him again and again
until I saw his sister watching me

I want to take it all back so Henry Gifford’s sister Diana
can see me again the way she used to see me
and furthermore I want to kiss her right this time
I want to kiss her the way I can kiss her now
not like the sloppy teenage drunk I was that night
all on fire with weed and schnapps and inexperience
I want her to not turn away from me
without knowing that I had just tossed my beloved knife out into the nighttime lake
I want her to know what passion can do to me
I want my passion back
because I think I lost it that night I tossed the knife into the lake
then let Diana run from me when she saw me beat her little brother bloody
without having a chance to make her understand why it was all so
necessary

and though I have had many knives since then
even another German switchblade just like that one
and though I have kissed so many people since then
in love and friendship and lust and grief

and though I‘m so much better at all of this stuff now
because control is everything
and control is all I have at 47

still there are times – rainy summer nights – when I get up late to use the bathroom
and while I’m standing there I look out my window across the manicured grass
I can just taste a ghost of peppermint schnapps on my lips
then I fumble for the light
I pick up a pen
and I write myself back toward August of 1977
when the radio played the songs of a dead man
while I nursed my bruised and tender fists
and cried like a baby for the very last time