PLAYING HANGMAN

I have read through enough of the Bible

  Belt, the Rust Belt, down Appalachia,

all across Los Angeles, Carbondale, Louisville,

  through enough extended stretches

  of Texas, alone,

under lightning from clouds at half

  mast, played hangman

in the marginalia

of lit magazines

with enough freshmen shrugged

off to college, a box of books

  for at-risk teens orphaned

beneath my feet,

to know

family is not forever.

Smiles and hellos

go a long way on the road

to saying goodbye. Often

a poet’s only grandeur

is a faux-leather seat

connected to sloshes of internet. I am hung

up

on so much. On a Megabus

there is nothing more tragic

than a boy with headphones

singing

next to my seat by the restroom. Eighty

miles later and I still Superman

them hoes. Eventually you become

your penetralia, your addictions,

even if it’s diction. I’ve become the patron

saint of high school seniors sentenced

to poetry. I am the poet laureate of angst.

Call me Subordinate Claus,

ho ho hum.

On my way home from Houston,

I watch as a young couple

climb down the upper deck. This young

man sports the same fade as my eldest son,

the same wonder razored

in his head. Bitch, you can skirt,

ya dig?

said the young man typed

to life.

He is the color of my desertion.

She is the shade of expectations thrown.

It is deeply ingrained

that things are wrong

with me. So I blame

the fates that I travel far, that I live young

to die old, that I

confuse my experience

for loose change in a mother’s purse.

When playing Words With

Friends with my sons

  we never spell out absent.

I tell you what’s wrong with me

because I love you.

 This young man

reminded me that to skirt means leave

  and when one skirts from a skirt,

an odyssey embarks. Not from shadow

  but into shadow does the animal

  of the mind leap, and I have miles to go,

  thin walls to hold,

  and cages to keep.

  We hang from what makes us great.