Your umpteenthth birthday. Pleading to candle
flames to take you along (put you out) when they
water down, and
chair legs always leaning
to tip
tumble, leave tattered little boy on his knees
(already scraped) and crawling toward
the kitchen (not his kitchen) looking for cookies,
and light,
and women,
women’s cookies.
You chew with the crumbs coating your lips.
Spewing across the slick tile,
“could you button up my shirt sleeves,”
could you,
could you?
Could I think of a reason not to (selfishness? self
fulfilled prophecy?)
that would justify an abandoned infant
around sharp objects. There is no way to say.
There is no one left to say who will emerge as his savior,
no one volunteers
as such, the medicine won’t pick up the telephone, and
even on the day of
the umpteenth birthday, the silence
surrounds. It only breaks itself,
whispering “we can’t fix a brain.
We can’t fix a brain because things don’t fix themselves”,
My own thinks this to be true too.
