Monthly Archives: August 1984
I remember laughing real hard
as my brother died in front of my eyes
swept under a big black dragon of a tractor
trailer screeching WHITE FUEL painted
on its sides and just just not braking in time
gobbling him up who’d been chased by
the angry grocer with a broom for stealing
some ice cream into the middle of the wide
wide street shouting and the wagon and the driver
and the screeching and the faces swarming in
the ambulance whooping it up and the white sheet
and the morgue and my mother shrieking
the burial and hysterical madness
my god my god I laughed and laughed
after all these years I laugh so funny
so exquisitely funny the way pain is
as it tickles your insides to death
A doctor once asked me why
stones should not be thrown
in houses made of glass.
They should, I replied
I said, they should
How else would one get out?
(Or think of Alice
at the core of mirrored shingles—
mind-menagerie, jungle of fragmented self—
ogling or smeared leers and everywhere eyes
with nothing to wipe away
distortions, but bags
and bags of broken stones.)
But he was not amused
and scribbled and smiled and conjectured
with his eyebrows. I glared
through raging eyes glazed with fear
and darkness all the way through
the Rorschach blots
building beaming rainbows to castles
and castles of refracted logic.
(Tears are constructed of such rainbows
and rainbows of such glass.)
Fingers pressed to the window pane
with the world whirring past
I wept cold as any stone trembling
all the way to the facility.