No words on an hour car ride
The country porch to the city of potholes and levees
Daughter reads a fiction of Enemies and Endings: The Ever Afters
Father asks, “What is wrong;” I do not want to talk about it
He says, “I am here when you are ready. I love you.”
A wall in tires rolling a swamp sunset over Manchac
The chartreuse sky begs to kiss the orange drop
Night curves the silence obstructing the view
Dinner on Freret individual plate pizzas
Quattro formaggio for her meatball for him
Offering exchange tastes
The young altar server says, “Daddy it is Friday.”
Father says, “It is not real.”
A belief system and a world of known packed in the hours
She is away twenty six out of thirty nights
A theistic belief in a merciful god monitoring cattle mastication
Quiet in a bustling parlor, her book, his Kindle reading Eckhart Tolle
Departure concrete she struts straight into locked bedroom
Will not speak or share, but he loves her waiting for the crab to molt
Wakes to prepare her breakfast with blueberries from Chili
Hour wait, knocks, no answer, wait, noon, no exit
Up since seven she tells him at one p.m.
Fever and an army of white bodied tissue nasal discharge scatter the floor
Anger eyeballs hone crumpled a cannon prepared to fire words
Bottled and frustrated, exhausted
That to rearrange her life, spend time with her father
Represents a raven’s nest of fishing string to untie
Her family is there: two younger brothers, grandmother, friends, plans
Mother on some work weekend; Dad rearranged his time for her soccer
schedule
The road and home games for a bird girl to fly
Drive Friday, Saturday, and Sunday once each cross the swamp
Sleepover birthday with girlfriends and Father says have this
My most precious time with you, I give you to be eleven
Play and sing and dance and practice your Beauty and the Beast lines
I will take you to the Saenger Theater, but you must in time
Decide what is real and not real
Take this rose of space if that is what you wish
I am a man who does not believe in saviors
There is an intractable nudity I walk
Though I may shield you
The glow emits in the starkness between two homes
I will give you Springsteen, Guthrie, Marley, Dylan
Sam Cooke, Amanda Palmer, Etta James, and John Lennon and this is the now
Yoga mat and salad station segmented manifestations
The bubbles of here in there of joy and faults
Lined fortunes and brave faces
Daughter says, “I want to leave, to go there, to not be here.”
Phone calls to former wives and current mothers
The mathematics of periods and planted seeds
Words can be like butcher blades scraping innards
Intestinal feces in production the rank of death attached to aging
Eleven and half bringing “Cars Two” and “Monster’s University” Pixar Dvds
For the ride like billboards from a home with Sprout Caillou, Thomas the
Train
The juxtaposition of an inverse rebellion to be younger
As she stares in his eyes to say, “I am not ready.”
The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, X-Men, and the edge of the Batman
A war of wanting her to be older afraid like a drowning her fingers will
slip
Into a hick abyss in a quagmire of lies told about him imparting
The mud thick, the candied strawberries
I do not want this. Don’t you tell
me how I feel. You don’t know just how I
feel.
Remembering sixth grade and first attractions
The introverted mechanism of wanting to hide; to avoid the creep
Daughter asking for a doll again after all had been jettisoned in the
move last spring
Last weekend Sunday morning the Fly levee behind Audubon Zoo
Father’s yoga mat, daughter him and two books
A camera attempting to take a picture of her with the Mississippi River
A recollection and objection as if there were a soul thief in the lens
Father tries to talk then and she just wants to leave
He remembers impersonating a bunny with her at four in her closet
After the divorce a throbbing youngling wanting parents to not be separated
The shake words and holding her and being held
The universe in a daughter
For today I am child, For today I am a boy
One day I’ll grow up and feel the power in me
Empathy in emitting, to be, to let go
Enron, let it go; Acorn, let it go
Katrina, let it go; Dallas, let it go
In-law residency, let it go; Porch monster, let it go
Court dates, let it go, Divorce, let it go
Abortions, let it go, Custody, let it go
Painted walls, let it go, Repainting walls, let it go
Blue Morpho, let it go, Flowered back, let it go
Ran-red-light smash, let it go, Hotel job, let it go
Contraption heart, let it go
Daughter reduced to a dinner once a month, let it go
The paradox of existence is that
We are not our mind
These stores of was or will be do not exist, but on the platform of the
now
Attachment against the current of volition is suffering
We hold and are held by the universe of what we are, which is love
Love is the balancing magic of usurping the illusion of time to be
To let it go to exist in an instantaneous pulse that to truly experience love
We must be our truest form absent want or fear; communicate and accept
Express but do not feign to posses
One is not bone or genetic proprietor or legal signature
Every face is the no face
Not insignificant but yes transmutable, a blurred reality beneath the
non-realty
Nationality, religion, colloquial idiosyncratic mannerisms, self are mind
scripts
Youth not yet strong to bear the bolt of lightning in the peel back
The alien father’s words attempting to explain to a daughter
How the birds speak to each other floating out on the Mississippi River
Between the barges and she says, “Dad there is only one.”
The acorn sits above the rocky patch behind her buttocks
The second pelican lifts wings and the two race four feet above the surface
A quarter mile apart zooming in sync towards the Greater New Orleans
Bridges
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