// [May 12]
Sterile and it’s Mother’s Day and I watch
my wife mothering our sons,
loving them to pieces and tatters,
confetti, smithereens:
I’m finding it hard
to swallow not
because I’m not
at peace
like a ship to harbor after
voyaging for twenty years past
every hard place
every rock and temptation and respite
and one-eyed monsters to be
evaded: I am at such peace but I take a beat
to pause, that’s all, to feel so full, hearted, set.
// [May 15]
The littlest one turned
five months yesterday and he really is
something as each of them is while
I am growing accustomed to feeling
nothing or if not feeling nothing then
conceptualizing an absence where something
once was amid the rest
of what makes up one
dear bodily fluid:
I could likely trace back
a cause or origin
story for this affect
if I wanted, and perhaps already have, but
even without said source
I’m starting to
consider the whole gamut
of my life to be an escape from
or a coming to terms with
shame:
As opposed to those morning glories
where my kids clamber into bed
to wrestle, nuzzle, giggle, and delight
in my attention, I contend
that to have shame crawling over you
is like lying
on a bed full
of hissing cockroaches
while splayed in
a straitjacket crammed
with millipedes while donning
a diving bell helmet stuffed
with spiders: And it’s not
a date I’d wish on anyone, in fact,
though maybe I ought to bite
my tongue given the state
of the world right
now, but that
aside I’ll say it
out: I think given
the option between world
peace and freeing every living
person from the interior
torrent of shame
I’d choose the latter: going back
to Eden, before we knew of
our nakedness, before
the need to cover up down
there with foliage only to call
our pubic hair centuries later
a bush: Maybe this
is my in-road into
injecting more
epic scope
into whatever this is
only to land
again [Surprise!]
on shame
which brings me
back to paradise and that devastation
Milton wrought
of Eve decrying that curse
and weeping for her children
for posterity’s sake
perhaps even of her spectral
not-children like my
spectral not-children
as with all that’s been taken
and that seems apropos
enough
for epic and tragic
registers alike.
// [n.d.]
Then sing, O Scandal, O Siren:
singe, scar, and sway: Let me
recount another aspect
of my procedure
to get another grasp
on it:
When the doc snipped
my right vas deferens
I felt nothing
because of the numbing
medication that burned
going in for sure, but
when the doc snipped
my left tubal fiber
I felt a shooting
pain like a pinched nerve and even
thought in a flash of
when James Franco’s Puck-ish,
ill-fated climber in 127 Hours
severs the tendon in his trapped
arm and the buzz and din hits
auricularly with full force at
Danny Boyle’s directorial
vision: Nevertheless
I put on
stoic face as best
I could and don’t
even think I winced: not
in some masculine urge
to appear tough but rather
due to that longstanding fear
of inconveniencing someone
or raising an alarm or causing
a scene.
// [July 21]
I’m holding my littlest
while the third plays
trains, thumb in mouth,
because he slept poorly
and has been
and the oldest two are
at a splash pad with
friends because they’re at that
age where they can
and don’t so much
need me
and the president has
announced he’s ending
his re-election campaign and
I think of his dead
daughter and son,
the dead one,
and I am still holding
my littlest
but am also
scraping a pool
of dried ice cream
off the coffee
table and the monstrous
pomposity strikes
in me the figure
of a Kinder Egg,
how that might
just be the image
I need
to situate myself
to my balls
now de facto
deflated or hollowed
out in an act
of delayed self-
negation
or erasure
or retconning while
my lovely pieces
of evidence not
only exist but
thrive and swell
and come
into their own.
// [August 11]
New report out
reveals testes
worldwide hold
microplastics and such
particulates in males
of the human
and canine
varieties: Mark
Cuban says “No balls,
No babies”
in my Bluetoothed ear
on an episode rerun
I watch to fill empty
minutes and long stretches
of the day
So I glance down to what’s possible
due to my allegedly newly
impossible children
who dwell in the ether
of my nethers
in my scrotum
and then turn
to that aforementioned
possibility of plastic
and daydream of fishing
out of my own
swollen testes
those scraps
(Aristotelian ideas) of
non-matter and siphon
them up into a kiln
of my own making
and melt that plastic
into molds of
troll dolls,
Potato Heads
and the rigid bits
of G.I. Joe
or He-Man
or Stretch
Armstrong to fashion
a horde of my specters,
those half- and
always-not-children
to give to my here-kids
who show on
their faces their reluctance
to take these dreamt-up
monstrosities and give
my primogeniture
something
to actualize.
