Bleached Coral 20160901

A year in or twenty nine depending on how one counts

Morning bites into solid food for the last time in a while

Laughing at the sidebar of a medical surgery

Teeth toying with me since I was eight: in and out

Recycling an approach of wanting to speak and not

Scripting notebooks and silence like lattice work crossed and peeking

Through the apertures of school yards, cafeterias, and upstairs libraries

To sequester to best not say much

Or feeling that way as if this were a barrier embossed

For the welded notion that big brother rather I did not join in

That we had divergent concepts of playtime between He-man and marijuana

Skateboards and Thunder Cats, father with shotguns and construction hammers

To G.I. Joe and bashed in incisors and a bloody skull bouncing concrete

Mother recollecting hearing the screams from down the street as the zombie walk home

Now sitting in an oral surgeon’s waiting room recounting to doc

Some irrelevant side story as he is about to collect his twenty-five grand from her son’s pocket

In a year of ripping out the failed implants to insert the bone of deceased bodies  

Transplant my gum tissue and replace four front teeth

So I can now officially be part of the walking dead

And I take my valium pre procedure and laugh

At the year that is to come to hopefully regrow cellular bonds as host

The mantra of it could always be worse and the privilege of affording

What is not covered by any insurance or payment plan because my mother

Once told me I would always have teeth and when I look at her I want to make her words

True here, not like Jesus or America, but at least this

At least to know that whatever monster I invented in my youth staring back

At me in the mirror tonight at thirty seven with four black holes stitched scar tissue

Smile out of a prison riot that there is laughter to be had

Such a frivolous appendage in a smile, the one taken for granted

In why an ex-wife chortled why I did not use mine more

Or a daughter gets so confused about who is Quasimodo

The swelling and staving infection and the spider web memories

Of junior high removable retainers and dentures with floating bicuspids

Chompers and delightful chalk mouth spelling and erasing memories of attempted kisses

And that Cato Stoic approach of testing the ridicule to care only about what is worth caring

Concern in becoming so that one can no longer be embarrassed by showing up alone

Or with his gay best friend and people saying this or that because fuck them

He is my friend and although we are not lovers I love him

World you can take and give teeth and at times my smile

You can sway these tears of facing that side of the bed empty

I will take the cushion of mediation and sit in that chair of surgery

I will bleed

I will take the injections absent the nitrous and pierce the thinning tissues

Holding this failing implanted metal and raze to the absent bone

And say I do not yield

I do not yield for you to say there is a mirror image to the fault in our stars to smile upon

That I am not this hunchback cast of daughter or wife or town

Flooded of Christ’s kiss and barren of star to wish

The salt of these waterfall eyes shall taste resolve upon these toothless lips

I shall cry thee freedom in surgical light

So that you may rip my bone and hammer

Chisel to pound what I spent an adolescence praying for to see this bulwark

Of independent romance fail but again and I shall smile at you with the humility

Of a first world problem, lavish and preposterous at how little such a thing is

As a sophomore’s self-esteem, oh ye angels of dentistry and mandible lutes

Play me into eternity in this piteous body, so feckless and wrought

Of spirited bone, let me rise from this merged in atom and frivolity

In the swelling and the ache of hours grinning for I have paid Charon’s toll

To smile at yee, I  have tossed my coin into the pyre

To have my haughty laugh

That I am still here a body crimpled and asked not to speak

In this rock chalk words jumbled and puzzle-toothed

Poetic and barbarous as to who will understand

Not enough country or friendliness or beauty in shine for some

And so the oceans spin round the rock, yet

I am still here growing like bleached coral painting anew