There’s Nothing Wrong with You
Dear twelve-year-old boy who eats frozen waffles three times a day while your mother makes a run for gas station chicken with every meth-shooting hard-leg in Pascagoula,
yea though I sit here choking down a po-boy with the crickets in my wisdom, triumphant and twice divorced, I wish I could write a happier poem for you.
If the water gets turned off, you can still drink from the bug-peppered oasis of your neighbor’s plastic swimming pool.
I wish it would stop raining long enough for me to throw a football with such a perfect spiral that my twelve-year-old self could catch it.
I found Classics of Western Thought, Vol 1. and Complete Tabla-ture: Paul Simon’s Greatest Hits in the dumpster behind my grandfather’s.
That June, I took up residence in Plato’s cave and all the above-ground graves and hostile Boudreauxs and Heberts of Chackbay, Louisiana, became a sweltering yet tolerable allegory.
I hope you never shoot up half the day just to shoot up half the day.
I hope you never compare the frozen waffles of youth to the frozen waffles of prison.
I sawed off a two-by-four, then drew six vertical strings with a black magic marker, fifteen short lines crosswise for frets and hummed the melody to “Me and Julio,” strumming that rotten ass rain-warped board.
It’s not always right to blame your mother.
There must be fifty ways to leave a mess.
Fifty ways to kick a skanky habit over and over.
Fifty ways to cook waffles when you’re twelve, when the day outlasts the soap operas and it’s impossibly hot in the parking lot of the apartment complex where no other kids seem to live,
when the nights are streetlights, mean and skinny, and the morning belongs to no one except the quiet, and time, and hunger, for which you are entirely suited.
Ever read The Book of There’s Nothing Wrong with You?
Me neither.
Nonetheless, they punched my free-lunch card.
Nor is it right to hate God, or anyone else busy sleeping in the blue casket of summer, bold with constellations.