POEMS OF THE FREAK

EDITOR'S PROLOGUE

Only his mother ever saw his face.
Journalists and social scientists,
Exploring every crack,
Every possible justification,
Studied the post-mortem household,
Focused finest scopes on this
Novelty denied to society
Attracted to anomaly. For years
Only omniscient rumor reported
The child's legendary amorphousness:

Hands like whale's fins attached to the trunk, 
Or the single mitten-like limb
Branching from his back, the head
Amorphous in size and shape,
Swollen at sunrise, shrunken by sunset,
The mouth a rose on his cheek.

In these verses that survive him,
Giving contour to his ashes,
Masculine words ascend childlike
Up to the night's cosmic bosom
That maternally absorbed him:
Young and on a day not recorded,
Except for the lore of a bonfire
His mother erected to forge him
formless in "God's black sight."

1
MIRRORS

My mother forbids them
but bathes me
in my wet reflection.

I try to piece my face
but she shatters it,
points to her eyes,

"See yourself here."
But nothing reflects
on her trembling lids.

2
ONLY ON SOME NIGHTS

My door is the womb
my soul presses against,
kicking to be, but only
on some nights it opens.

Holding my one hand
with fingers like hers,
my mother takes me
as night holds the other.

Upward dive my eyes
into black-water sky;
far my heart swims
across starry lake.

I want to be alive
every single night.
"Not in full moons."
Drooling, I mouth "Why?"

3
MEASURING MOON BEAUTY

A freak's head that changes
from round to thin to shame,

but distance distorts into beauty
that pocked silver face.

How far must I be
to be seen beautiful?



4
SHADOW SIDE

In my crater mouth
every possible utterance
awaits its turn
never to be said.

5
ALL ONE

Of my poems etched
with fisted pencil,
always face-down,
as my heart hammers
against the floor,
I never cremate
coherent ones, the lies.

Only mirrors of me,
decomposed
in gibberish
like "grubpiclok"
and "kmopeinoque,"
word freaks
on crumpled paper,
joyfully I torch.

6
MEOP

Some days the bulb’s light
inflicts pain,
my feet balloon,
sores erode my elbows,
sounds hatch on my lips
only to die and rot,
my pencil will not write
because I remember
who is pushing it, I,
humpbacked, pimply-skinned.

Then, poet of spit,
I splatter out growls,
break not lines but chairs,
overturn my mattress
while upstairs my mother
recites holy words.

7.
THE NIGHT

Another kind of mother,
she ages us in her belly
except in this birth
we don't come out
but are sucked deeper in,
split into egg and sperm,
dissolved in Life's eye.

8.
FATHER

Before answering my written question, she exhales.
"He's around you, like the moonlight."
I meant my real father, maker of freaks.
"He was handsome outside, like you inside."
She explains different kinds of seeing.

She once erupted, "Just like your father"!
I, just a boy, persisted at something.
She swears she meant the Father of all things.
"One morning he was gone," once breezed
through a crack in the wall and forever
in my ears. Who is my father? I still ask,
always imagining a handsome man.

9.

INCANDESCENCE

As the book yawns,
I erase the light,
become its absence,
its blank memory.

My overfed eyes
vomit into darkness
the ink I had read.

I pray for the fever,
the whale's breath,
the swallowing stare
of God's black sight.