Friday, July 26, 2002

Sweeping the Gene Pool Grey

Sweeping the Gene Pool

Grey as the bones of hated children
bowed like rickets-addled legs
Her teeth looked like they’d try to bite her
Her smile ate the air around her face
and still she waved me ever closer.
With my back against a wall
I felt I had enough protection
then she tore apart the package
and everything came pouring out
Nod was all I had to do
for her to share her fetid world
she knew I was her therapist
though but an object of convenience
able to withstand her rantings
anything that didn’t run away
I’m sure would have been quite sufficient
Nonetheless I think that she was grateful
that I had a face to foil her ravings.
Her beer was pale urea yellow
her hands were thick, her boots were black
She’d weighed herself before I got there
mene mene tekel baby
I would either act as her confessor
or drown in her ecstatic angst
It’s Friday, she announced with glee
and Junior has been put to pasture
How could he presume to tell her
She had only said Good Morning
then he just uncorked the stupid
scattered it around them both
Extending a hand like a Shiva with dropsy
she laughed at a spot where nobody was sitting
and quoted herself as she told him to talk to it
Talk to the hand, she laughed, puffing a cigarette,
pale grey smoke that became her complexion
Her victory over the twerp was resounding
I had to admire her logical triumph
It just left me speechless; I nodded in silence
afraid that a word would provoke further stories
but I was mistaken, she needed no prompting
she turned that carnivorous smile upon me
accused him of getting thrown out of the gene pool
To think of her bearing a child was ghastly
but sent her in reveries of a lost youth
when she wandered the streets of Vancouver in search
of a beer or a buzz or a place that was quiet
She’d dropped out of school – there was no explanation –
but Dad had insisted she pay her own way
She was 14 years old with a fist in her face
as she said it she saw it and fed me the memory
clear as the dregs of the beer she was drinking
And then she got up and she went back inside
to play pool.

We were free once again of her morbid good cheer
and the air was delicious and sound sounded sweet
as we shook the residual murk from our shoulders
living again in an era of light
and then she came back, with her grin taking over
her head till she couldn’t defend herself from it
it split her right open and since we were buddies
she buffeted us with a bludgeon of words
She went off on her childhood, brothers that beat her
or scared her, a pillory stock for a home
she read her own Dante and Nietzsche and Kant
and their corpses would float in the beer in her head
she had punched out a window, an eye that looked out
from the school she had left for a reason unstated
then stood on the field at night howling madly
some pig took her down to the hospital later
he told her she wasn’t behaving herself
she took untold stitches but hated the doctor
the only nice guy was the ambulance driver
an angel of mercy who did what they told him
And now she refuses to binge on tequila
Canadians ought to drink beer, she reminded
us, laughing, insensible to our discomfort.

For a moment we sat in remedial silence
and some of us thought that perhaps she was finished
but then she got started on living the good life
she showed us a forearm – That’s gonna be me,
she announced to a spot where nobody was sitting
in radiant color a girl made of ink
shook her nipples and beckoned
that we should all follow her
she wore a grass skirt and her hair tumbled
passionately over veins that were sewers
Of course she’s got boobies much bigger than mine
she advised us superfluously with a laugh
But still that is where I am going someday
with a rustling skirt I can pluck from the dunes
When I’m reincarnated I want to come back
as a lichen, they live to be over a thousand
and weather each storm like a day in the park
I’m sick of the rain, you know I’m a Canadian
Talk to the hand and Get out of the gene pool
Here is my childhood, grinning, she told us,
and showed us the opposite forearm and wrist
where a black tattoo putti stood vacantly staring
it wore a plain smock for victorian moppets
that enshrouded its small frail body completely
except for its head, which was stripped of all flesh
its skull looked upon us, the sockets quite empty
in purplish-black on her canvas of skin
and she said, That’s my history, here is my future,
her forearms extended, awaiting her suicide,
her glass sat beside her, bereft of its contents
but yawning and vacant like I was now feeling
she got up to leave us, she needed her sustenance,
we wanted her out of there, bade her farewell;
so she walked up the stairs and back into the darkness
alone as she’d been when her smile first bit me
I looked at my beer and it asked me to pause
till the air pressure equalized
All had gone flat
so I looked up above
at the dusk-painted leaves

see you at happy hour - Lucky 13 Fridays on the patio