SCRAWL

hands searching empty

pockets for pills

for your address or your

phone number

any of a hundred thousand different

meaningless addictions on a

grey sunday afternoon and in the

2:00 silence there are all of the sounds

we no longer make and all of the

ones we never hear

in between this collapsing palace and

the distant ebb and flow of

freeway traffic is the field where we

lost van gogh or the one where

pollock lost himself

no rain and then rain and

my youngest son wants to know why

it’s so depressing

asks me while i stand on the

sidewalk looking up at the cracked and

leaking gutter

says he wants to go to

his mother’s house

says he’s afraid of me when i yell but

the phone never rings and the

bills are never paid on time and

the last painting i ever finished was

                                     20 years ago

was a landscape that i painted over a

portrait of the only woman i

ever loved, and then i threw it out

at some point anyway

wore my funeral shoes to my

sister’s wedding

crawled to the river’s edge on the

morning of my father’s death and

vomited up 25 years of resentment

walked back home barefoot

felt good just to bleed for reasons

that were finally my own