A TABLE, FOUR CHAIRS & A BENCH, a poem, PART ONE

A TABLE

  

I moved back to my parent’s house, the place where I lived only a year – I can’t yet dare to call it home even if the rub that family rubs sticks – and for the past 17 years have only seen in the wintry, sparkling, times, after getting sick and losing my job. I now sit at the family table, writing this, while watching TV and drinking a beer. “European beer is stronger than American beer,” my father says to me and I say no, that’s not necessarily true. He says I’m being contrarian, which I’m not being, just truthful. But he lets me drink his beer anyway.

There are always more beers. There are no other father.

 Poetry is symmetry shot through a skewed lens:  one eye open, the other shut & dreaming. I dream of someone named Hartlaub and feel like I’m bad at spelling. I dream of shag carpets on the top of indelible men and feel like taking a bath but men look infantile in a bathtub and take a shower instead. I dream of bumper cars and feel that the very idea of bumper cars, like sausages, require a room with a view.

I write this after being off anti-depressants and feel something akin to something again. And can get a boner.

I don’t do anything with the boner, but I’m glad I have it.

I sit at this table now, writing these words, among the others that have sat at this table before, in the same way I would eat my own meals, alone, in the city, and still watching the same thing at the same time I would have I never had left. I sit at this table now and, while alone, do not feel alone. I sit at this table now and think about high school, about Spam, about the puddle of wine on the carpet when I had a party while my parents were away that never sunk in deep enough to debunk my image as a good son. Some things last a long time.

I sit at this table now, writing these words, and stare out the window and stare. They call me, the little bird houses on the edge of the window, no birds inside.

The same cracks in the family plaster still haunt, only closer now still.

I’m not used to turning on and off lights, as I enter and leave each room; having rooms (as in plural) to begin with. The dark places aren’t scary; they’re exciting. I turn on the light and there’s just the room in front of me. A room somewhat familiar, yet distant, like an ocean you’ve seen before but the waves look different because waves are like snowflakes and other drops of water, waiting, crashing down when you least expect it. I try to talk myself out of taking a pill tonight and almost succeed. I almost succeed at everything I do.

And I do.