Last night I woke to visions of the whale and on the black wall of my mind the strangled Ahab floundered in the ropy sea and I lay gasping at the flushing in my heart while Moby Dick went sounding down my soul.
My nightmare mind projects it on the hidden wall and Moby Dick is monstrous on the wall and guzzles down my innocence like wine.
Ah Melville, rest ye easy? Far from this sad world where men are daily dragged to Davy's Locker? Where overhead the seabirds scavenge for the fluttered bits of dreams the ocean vomits?
I am not a listener to tales and yet I've thrown my own harpoons and more than once have found they flew their mark and more than once have found they speared a friend.
And Moby Dick is monstrous in his mystery. Un-impressed by Ahab's sacred madness (Ahab called him evil and went casting lone and vain upon the fearful waters of his heart) un-impressed and wakened once he turned and nodded once and sent the blameless Pequod down the drain.
The fury all is in me turning on itself and I become like Ahab molding pointless lances and I become like Stubb the mate still chuckling in despair. Serene, like Queeg-queg, trying on his fate. And I am Starbuck rational and frozen overwhelmed and turning lost in Ahab's whirlpool eye.
But I am most like Ishmael most like him who in the awful clamor floated on a coffin round and round the circling edge of doom
staring horrified across a vacant sea.
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Because you cannot live piecemeal
one man each for the tea and sympathy one for the bedroom study and den
and because they will not hold still for the stitches
one patchwork husband the sum of his parts
you will drop that sweet nightmare and settle for me
a factory model with kinks
slightly used
but that won't at least split at the seams.
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the newspapers chorus her son's misdeeds a litany sung in familar tones neglect abuse those old mortalities
miscarriage one more prayer unanswered
delinquency guaranteed by birth
a seed the doom her baby
curled up behind bars a rabid stray
all night God's judgment smokes along her nerves
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The clouds in this room settle heavy as winter, these inches of sheet a white tundra between us.
So how can my fingers, bare-knuckled and groping, creep chilled through that wasteland to paw at your flesh?
On such black nights as this, when our minds whirl up blizzards, when hearts, like slow peasants, lie shredded by wolves,
the body leaves pride stiff and blue in the snowbank, taught only one instinct and one way back home.
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My father didn't vote this year. In a country like ours he says it's the least he could do.
They came for him late one night in black vans with no license plates.
When Mom went downtown to protest she was gone all week.
Back home now on the sofa she watches TV all day in dark glasses and won't talk
and can't stand to be touched.
To his credit Dad stood his ground when they dragged my big brother kicking from the soccer field and hot-wired his groin.
To this day he can't pee without screaming.
But how can a man not break when he hears how they've hauled his beautiful stuck-up daughter hysterical from a closet and spent all night in his kitchen honing razors on her face?
It wasn't until they started strangling me all of nine years old outside his door
that he crawled from his cell with no food and just a spigot dripping sludge
spitting rat bones and bug legs
and government slogans.
Someday I'll be old enough to vote.
I can't wait.
In a country like ours it's the least I can do.
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