I write this with soil of the verdant cathedral staining my fingers.
A sensible man would have gone to sleep hours ago.
I haven’t gotten this far being sensible.
Let the spider’s venom make your blood rush
and your feet dance out the exorcism of remorse.
If you want to be excellent
you have to push yourself well beyond what’s comfortable.
Open yourself fully to the sting of Lyssa’s phantom gadfly.
I am the bull of my father, he who comes
from Eleutherai and frees from all cares.
I have stamina like you would not believe.
Harlequin says,
“I am the raggedy cloth man,
the patchwork messiah,
Frankenstein’s monster.”
I shall call myself Il Bagattino now.
It doesn’t matter what others call me,
only the Others.
My father was a Blackfoot Indian,
a rodeo star who road bulls and chased work on ranches
during the off season.
He was a free spirit, a drunken clown, an eternal boy
who had lied about his age so that he could enlist early in the Marines
to escape the dead end of the reservation.
He was a whirlwind that woke my mom up
from her pampered Italian princess life,
made her aware of what was out there in the wider world.
She walked in on him once with another man in drag.
She just closed the door, went away
and when she came back they never spoke about what she saw.
But from that moment on, they had an understanding.
When we were looking to move to a new place
my dad would count the number of churches
and compare that to the number of bars. If it was greater than 2 to 1
we kept on going.
She never loved another the way she loved him;
she spoke of Harvey fondly and often, especially towards the end.
There was such a terrible sadness and loneliness in her voice when she did so.
They never found a trace of him. They were still looking a couple years ago
when I applied to get a copy of my birth certificate and they mistook me for him.
A couple months before he disappeared we were out camping
and we all got bit by wolf spiders.
Swelled up real bad and everything.
Yes I’m aware that all the elements of my cosmology are contained in that story.
I suppose that should trouble me
– a Freudian would have a field day –
but it doesn’t.
The best myths are the ones written in blood and wine.
The more you talk about yourself,
the more you obliterate yourself
until all that remains is story.
Circles, etc.
