Sweet Child

Not competitor, not utility, sweet child of mine.
Love has no object.
The peacock spider, I never heard of it,
this Wonder, this Marvel,
I never heard of it before.
The rhino fish, I never heard of it before.
The ape hound, I never heard of it,
the coon cat, the grass fly.

Not advisor, not saboteur, sweet child of mine.
Love fixes no role, makes no guarantee.
The wolf man, I heard of him,
his uncontrollable change,
like when Mom transformed at lunch,
under her fast-turning metamorphic spell.
Feel guilty, feel angry, feel shameful, feel rage-ful,
collapse on linoleum.
I hand her her pocketbook,
coax her to find the money she'd promised
as she cried on the floor.
It was the hundredth time, and a hundred times more terrible,
but I need that quarter Mom!
The kids are stopping at Carl’s for football cards after school.

Not quizzing everything but in solution with it all.
Not combinator, not divisor: container that pockets
an anomaly. The singular contains the divisible,
like a silver coin exploding pennies.
The glove mouse, I never heard of it.
The dance-foot-arch-face, its yearning for sex.
The climbing bat, the whip-tail deer,
I never heard of it.
Not desire, not want neutralized, sweet child of mine.
Can love exist without desire? Without revulsion?
The bottle-broke goat, the rusty-touch rat,
I never heard of it before.

While Dad napped on the lounge
that folded and nipped my fingers if I'm careless,
I snuck a drink from his beer.
He’d dropped his cigarette butt in the can,
in the swill at the bottom
of his Schaefer. Dad's Pall-Mall ashes:
I didn’t know, I just saw the grown-up beer can, my sleeping father.
I slurped it in, the butt a shocking mass like when you’d swallow an ice cube,
gray ash paste spreading cancer in my throat.
I wanted to wake him and tell him I’m sorry,
I’m gonna die from cancer poison,
because I broke the rule and was a sneak,
that afternoon beside my sleeping father in terror of death