Sometimes A Broom Is Not A Cigar

I have many things to return to you.
I've been taking care of them for a long time
without really attending to them,
like an absentee landlord,
like an invalid gardener who lets the weeds take over,
or maybe, possibly, like a widow
who discovers that the contents of her safe deposit box
have tripled in value.

These things were installed in me at an early age,
and like asbestos in the walls,
they've been poisoning me ever since.
I've discovered the probe,
the implant behind my ear,
and I'm having it surgically removed.

Now that I've written the eulogy for my first life,
and before I mail the birth announcements for my second,
I need to take inventory of your gifts,
your plagues and pestilence that have taught me so much,
so that I can return every last one of them to you.
You see, they were never mine to accept in the first place.

You assumed a parental duty to feed me
with bits of your own flesh,
and I, likewise, felt obliged to lick the wounds,
like an animal trapped with it's brood on an empty ice floe.
I thought it was my business to transform your feces
and your nightmare abortions into gold,
but now, your emotional landfill
with it's hundred-year halflife
is staining everything a cancerous brown,
so I'm giving it all back.

I'm giving back the pussy cat you said I tortured
--that was a lie.
You were the one with the leash, the whip and the glove.

I'm giving back the Playboy magazines you appropriated,
hiding your flaccid anxiety behind bathroom bravado.

I'm giving back the Punch and Judy nightsticks and hammers
with which you clubbed each other half to death.

I'm giving back the duplicitous phone calls at 12:00 AM
and the blind-eyed amnesiac trips to New York.

I'm giving back your floppy three-cornered cuckold's hat
and the accompanying ribald libretto.

I'm giving back your contractual fluids
squirted through holes in solemn bedroom sheets.

I'm giving back Dr. Freud's triangle,
where boats and planes and symbolic submarines
are never heard from again.

I'm giving back your passive-aggressive nipple-biting
and your eunuch's mirror that hides genitalia,
like a fat man's belly obscuring his penis.

I'm giving back your lurking father-fear
and the castrating knife behind your back.

I'm giving back your insect mouth
that severs members during fellatio.

I'm giving back your half-acknowledged seductions
and your intellectual incest.

I'm giving back the box-row seat
at the foot of your marital love-bed,
and the playbill for the impotent king
and his wretched child bride.

I'm giving back your cheating heart
and your d-i-v-o-r-c-e.

I'm giving you back all those stories,
those blueprints I once thought were mine;
those dark burlesque narratives,
cheap smutty novels written by psychotics and cretins,
horrible made-for-tv softcore porn movies,
with all the sickening shame and embarrassment
of a catholic school sex-ed filmstrip,
rerun and rerun over and over again
on a channel that can't ever be changed.

Your enmeshment was more cruel slapstick than sadism,
the Three Stooges with a dildo in the eye,
but still enough to cripple and dislocate
a green and unshelled young child.

I'm noticing an empty space
where your dysfunctional library used to sit;
a stretch of wall once occupied
by your infernal diseased volumes
reeking like a noxious pussy-fart,
with titles like How To Ruin A Marriage,
and How To Repeat The Same Mistakes Ad Nauseum
Without Ever Learning A Goddamned Thing.

That space is clear now,
and the sunlight through the open window
reveals nothing but spotless white,
and I'm wondering
what sacred lovers,
what coiling angels of light,
will soon be blown in
on the virgin wind.

David Aronson
August 2006