Your Substance Of Choice
hollers at ya.

It tells tales, says

stick with me
and live
forever.

As proof it shows you
your worst parent,
the long thought dead
mostly unmissed one,
waving at you
from inside a shoebox
you use to hold
photos,
odd linty pills, a penknife
with a bent blade
that won’t stay open.

See that?  Back
from the dead
like I said —

stick with me, kid,
and live forever.

What am I saying, you’re not
a kid anymore — what am I 
saying?

You’re grown, you got this —
hollaback
holla
back
y’all.
C’mon.

A penknife with a bent blade
that won’t stay open.  A brown crust
in the pivot point keeps it
from locking into place.
You won’t clean it.

Odd linty pills
for cold and flu, allergy,
sleep, pain.
You can’t even be certain they worked
when they were new and fresh.
You won’t throw them away.

Photos.  Not enough
and too many.  The tiny parent
waving among them,
a frond in funeral decor,
a skin tag gone horribly huge;
you won’t look.

Back from the dead
come the dead
you don’t wanna know

but c’mon,
you’re all grown up,
the dead can’t hurt ya,
you’re no kid anymore — 
holla back.

Shove the box into the closet
so its load can’t seep up
into your dreams.  Strap on
the getaway shoes. Get the hell
away from the house.

Your Substance Of Choice
can’t run. It can’t
fly.  All it can do
is lurk and lie
and beg you to notice it
lying there. That’s how it got
your worst parent.
That’s why
you never stop moving.

He’s jerked awake in the morning
by a sound from inside
one of the dresser drawers.

Pulls it open to find
a tiny family living in there —
he startles them at breakfast, tells them
to keep it down, goes back to bed
to sleep some more
and not to lie in wonder
at the miniature panic he’s caused
across the room, not to lie in wonder
at tiny people scrambling to hide
among his socks.

That tiny people live furtively
amid his domestication
and it is not a source of wonder to him
is in itself a source of wonder.

He may think
upon rising again
that it was a dream,
his waking was a dream, the faces
upturned in horror a dream, the diving
away from the light a dream.  Or
he may believe he was awake.
He may now believe in the little people
quite sincerely
and decide that they
have been present for his entire life
and he only now sees them.
He may consider his sudden ability to see them
a sign of maturity.  He may tell himself
that these wonders that came to him unbidden
are wonders common to all
if they all would just open their eyes. And
he may fall back asleep pondering
the potential uses of such a family
to darn his socks, arrange his drawers,
care for his small desires, fulfill
need he will have to invent…
right now all he wants
is for them to be quiet
while he tries to sleep.

That’s a source of wonder.

That he does not care to know them
or learn more about them,
ask their names, apologize
for the interruption, offer
to make amends,
that he goes back to sleep
as soon as possible
is a source of wonder.

That this has all happened before
and happens over and over
is a source of wonder —
someone, anyone,
get to those little people somehow
and tell them
to run while he’s still
asleep.

Here’s the myth 
of the new global village
exposed in a single fact:

if all you know of me
is what I post and 
what part of that you see,

when I die in real life
and stop posting
anywhere

you might not notice
for a week or two,
you might twinge

just a bit at my absence,
maybe a bit more if you then learn
why I’m gone,

and then, I know
you’ll forget me
soon enough.

No memorial, no stone,
no tomb to keep me
vibrant for you for a long time — 

oh, perhaps you’ll recall
a line or a picture,
a word or a comment,

but as for knowing my scent
or smile or touch — was I ever,
could I ever have been

real to you if you never saw
anything of me past
what I decided you should see?
 
How is this
different
from how it once was?

Forgetting each other
has become 
as easy as 

meeting each other
across oceans
and continents,

though knowing each other
is as hard
as it as always been.

A visionary
beyond the swinging Doors
signals to me
that from that side
he sees me
as I should be.

I tell myself it won’t be
a momentous occasion
at all to
walk through them
to meet him.
Without fanfare, without
ceremony, I step before him
and ask what it was he saw
back there before
I crossed over
to this space.

He explains
that it can’t possibly be
of any import now
for me to know that
since I’m on the side of the Doors
where the Angel Of Redefinition lives
and the nature of the passage
is that you are no longer who you were
before you came through.

When I demand to know anyway,
to have a complete explanation
for that past,
he shoos me back through
to wait my next turn.

Through fear
and a stubborn insistence
upon certainty
regarding my identity
I have lost
an opportunity to be
new,
and now I’m stuck here rueing
the desperation that drove me
to strand myself
in the muck of what
I’ve always been.

Angry at old women
whispering their racist views
in the checkout line at the store.

Angry at myself 
for putting my head in my hands
while listening to them.

Angry that I did nothing
because of bone fatigue
and a fear of my own harshness.

Angry again, switched to
default position: impotent
anger.  I put my head

back into my hands and weep
that what I am, I despise
and what I despise most, I have become.

If I’ve left anything unsaid
to anyone who wanted
certain words from me,
certain expressions
on my face,
certain raised eyebrows 
or upturned lips,
I offer my sorrow for
those omissions;
my apologies

for having held back,
having depended
upon context to do
my duty for me, having been
paralyzed again and again
into a taciturn and morose
stick figure of a man, a thick
mistaken figure of a man;
my apologies

for not permitting 
those small reserves
of joy I held within
to seep out,
to leak into my face
and tint my space
in this dim world
more often with you,
more freely among you;
my apologies

for this offering 
which comes too little, too late
for some, I am certain,
I offer no excuse for it
or explain it other than to say
forgive me,

somewhere what I learned
of manhood
cloaked me in shadow
and now, at last, 
I see how this 
has stunted me
and held me apart
from too many
for too long.