What Daddy
Our departure is very alarming to me, still. I still feel caution tape around my heart. But also it has caused many pleasurable detriments to my existence. I have run out of nail polish; I cart miniature bottles of booze in my pocket and call it a liquor cabinet.
Our house turned to ash, but so what—we were poor—our house was basically fiberglass and trash to begin with. At this point (our story’s climax), you moved to El Paso and I short-circuited in a roadside field. But in the morning something happened: brightly-colored tents appeared.
Today is a new day where I perform tricks balancing on a red ball for gold tokens.
I am bulkier now, less eschewed, not an accountant. A den of wolves, tyrants, fat ladies, and conjoined twins cuddle me at night and tell me about things foreign to me, like ancestors. They’ve taught me that not having a house anymore is how you get a family. They keep me tidy, beloved, and en route.
Sometimes I wonder what family you were dying for there beneath your lapels, that made you burn it. But it doesn’t matter now. A thing happens one day and you go along with it until another thing happens. Nobody tells you that when you’re a kid. But this is how you live.
For the first time ever, I am alive with the smell of dogs, face paint, trapeze-grease, and manure!
For the Bears
I enjoy drawing blood, too. I understand how it is about a growth process and also how the growth process is a myth. I like to taste a forest’s special, deathly taste.
I believe in the bears when they swat my shoulder from behind or my behind from behind. They have no shame and I want that. So I go live in a forest with bears because bears do not have any myths.
The bears say “Cut down the hive so we can have at it. We can’t climb trees like we used to, but we know you motherfuckers have ladders. We are going to nap now.”
I leave the hive to suffocate in a trashbag in the sun, but after their nap the bears won’t eat because they say the honey tastes plasticky now.
“But I read instructions on how to do it.”
They say my instructions were very logical and only useful to humans.
I eat the hive alone myself and it empowers me, but then I am used to a plastic flavor.
I am an empowered, lonely bear with an angry tongue. I am ready to tear down houses and replace them with trees. I am ready to tear down houses and eat them. To stomp houses in a bear-riot.
I never could understand their houses completely, and now I cannot understand them at all.
