The Dumbest Thing I Ever Heard

This little one-year-old boy—
afraid of haircuts,
afraid, at first, of my beard
and my dark eyes—
he's wobbling up to a drumset with a stick grasped in his hand,
his hair in his eyes and
a smile on his face:
Kacheessh! Boww! Boww! Boom! Crash!

Hey, you little bitch ... Get off the drums and bang on
     somethin' else! yelled the uncle, just a fuckin' kid
          himself. He didn't know any better.
But the tears came—and the human baby boy
     learned one more thing to be afraid of.

"Come on," I said and got up. "Let the kid play a little—
     you may need him to fill-in one day and you'll be glad
          he got a head-start on the kit." Taking the boy's hand
               in mine, I grabbed another stick
and sat the boy on my lap, then began to play a 1:2 beat
and then into a 4:4 hiphop thing.
The kid stopped crying and when his smile returned
     we all knew I was right.

I told the father a few days later over a few beers: Don't teach
     your kids how to survive the real world.
Don't train them for that mess—
they'll get enough of that already.
Instead, teach them what Love is ... something better
     than the world we're living in.
Teach: All that shit cannot penetrate a human heart
     unless you let it.
Make yourself proof of it. Wink at them in the face of
     pointless anger,
grinning back to them while hatred wears a blind
     mask of realism.

We are always being led to our deaths, this is true, but
     the lucky ones are those smiling,
not because life has smiled better upon them,
but because they have already learned something
greater than death.


The Dead Facets

Too many people think they have the right
to judge other human beings.
But they don't.

Sure,
you can judge an action as right or wrong,
but the second you place that prejudice or judgment on a character,
you
are the fool.

The next time you wanna smack the drink out've some kid's hands,
     call him a drunken faggot with dick-sucking-lips and laugh
The next time you hear about some fuckhead shooting a gun
     into people at their school or work or into an innocent
          civilian or P.O.W.
The next time Kurt Cobain's name comes up in conversation
     and you think to say, "Ya know, good riddance.
          No respect for the dead guy."
Don't open your fucking mouth without a little sympathy first.
Forget what you think you know, and even what they might
     tell you if they had the chance ...

Perhaps,
every person you have ever had a bonding experience with,
     positive or negative, created a facet of your personality.
The person you are as a whole.
And the stronger the bond, the greater the facet.

I see this as the exponential growth of our adult beings.
See the hypochondriac, shaken with paranoia and doubt.
     Was he picked on feverishly at school?
     Did his mother coddle him as a child?
A parents' bond is known as one of the strongest factors
     of personality development, and perhaps this boy's
           mother screamed at him once for jumping
               into a lake—threw pills and syrups and sprays
                     constantly down his throat—let him stay home
                         from school when a single hair on his head
                              wouldn't stay put.

How many of your facets have died?
The bonding relationship turns inversely proportionate
     in death.
My parents were divorced throughout my adolescence,
     so my father would visit on weekends, take
          my younger brother and I off to his home
               or my grandmother's house, and we had many
                    good times, quiet times together,
                         fond memories still.
I've realized now, as an adult, that I was a different person
     in those days—my brother was a different person
          in those days.
We acted differently than at our mother's, our "real home."
We acted differently, played different games, even laughed
     in different ways.
We were different people.
Til one night, our father died, tragically, in an automobile
     accident only a few miles from his home in Mastic,
          New York Long Island.
I saw our father for the last time, at age seventeen,
     in an open casket, makeup caked on his face,
     flies landing down on his jacket.
I can tell you: my brother hasn't laughed the same way since.

Now, if you're wondering what happened to those two
     little boys, one on the peak of manhood,
They died too, a piece of them, a facet ...
The brothers that used to play cards and board games
     instead of Nintendo, used to go out to parks and jog and
          chase geese, and at night would watch R-rated movies
                and mouth-off differently than they ever could
                    get away with at home.
Now, if You, the reader, are presently up to this point,
     and you find that your heart is racing
faster than your
eyes can
blink,
than I know that this poem
is not
just
about me.


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