A madness possesses me that I cannot direct,

Nor redirect, nor disown.

A madness that drives me to dangerous streets

In answer to the siren’s call of intoxication.

And like the weakness that feeds the wiles of an incestuous lover

Who knows no class nor intelligence, I heed the call.

I get up from a wet and sloppy bed unnew.

Tired from sad dreams and empty rooms

I hear the familiar.   What happened to you?

A memory refuses to unfasten from 

The father who lay stretched on a coach,

prone on his torture rack 

And furious brothers and a maid

Who adored the cat and my mother.

I was protected from

the empty,  bitter home of wornout dishes.

There was a roving mother and  a tired father

With neglected beds and table legs

A busted down home with condiments.

Not brothers and sisters – monsters all

I played with a derelict brother.

For literature – a calender

Pictures of new snow in fields, serenity.  I stared at them often.

Sitting on a white bed amongst bored walls

Captain Kangaroo spoke in black and white

and for stimulation – buttons to be sorted and resorted and resorted….

With sad toys,  cried and picked over

by five angry children.

A monotony of tone and broken imagination that knew

No limits nor that there were none.

No scholarly achievements were celebrated at my house,

only pictures worthy of ridicule   

Not a part of education, I fought tooth and nail,

My very life in every punch

In my brooding grief.

Tears were never shared, nor  fear. 

Cynicism my protector and jailer

No invention of future every struck me. 

Nor later, in a back field, facedown

On foreign streets or in dirty snow mountains

The ice loomed in the dark behind my house cradling me in cold as I lay drunk

My body refusing to die of cold or drink.    

Friends didn’t stay, friends that loved me first

Pushing aside all other loyalties

I want you to come you have to come to come

you have to Be here, it can’t be done without you.

My mother forgot my name

But I won’t forget yours

The greatest thing I’ll ever learn

Is to be loved and love in return

I woke up this morning with the same past

And the steel armour that became me. Listen

I never went to my graduation

I never arrived to a homecoming

Laid out for me

Or celebrated  a shower for a birth

Or a marriage

And graduated without notice

I ran and lived in cities

That held too many strangers

.