Big fight with my wife
for the umpteenth time,
acrimony, contempt.
Fuck it.
I’ll go get an apartment and a hotplate
and write poems.
But I stay.
Mainly I stay because our son
(mildly autistic) makes up
words like “pretensiologist”
and “Marxmas” (everybody gets the same thing).
Neon, for our family, neologisms.
When he reaches college age, his
mom and I may break up. Her family
has money. I’ll be poor.
I’ll heat up soup on my hotplate,
concocting poems partly out of
words the kid created.
I’ll stare into space,
less happy than I am now,
remembering.
I may recall grayish cartoons
by Ben Katchor. He wrote about
old people, conscious of
their sorrowing, their monthly checks
the opposite of lip gloss, of adolescence.
Masten’s Variety: a bin of dusty
jawbreakers I saw long ago intrigued me.
Where did they come from?
(Oxymoron: candy that hurts.)
In one Katchor cartoon
a truckload of lipsticks
overturns, leaving
a red
Rita Hayworth smear on
a highway in New Jersey.
(The Information Superhighway’s
nowhere to be seen.)
Red’s in my mind,
gray’s on the page.
Katchor, all he was after
was a pang of
nostalgia
made possible by small companies.
Sweet man.
Ma put on red red lipstick
before she left the house.
Also a scarf. Old-fashioned.
Ma made good gravy,
I wiped it up with white bread.
I loved her fourth best
on my walk around the world,
my father second,
my son first.