Time is a gesture spinning and which way is bluest?
I followed pain horizontally toward whatever felt
newest and was lost and lost. Lyn says, there are many
weathers. Makes sense, like many angers. Distances
are crushing and mountains figure themselves and
smoke is hung as a familiar city is surely ruined
inside me. I am singular in the world now, left broken
by the broken. And remember the strange economy
where a lover said, you’re worth so much, more than any other,
said, I hope you never become your mother. But where is
the mother now? Inside or out? Maybe pain is a language
I must begin to doubt more. But not the angers, they are
useful in their ways. Like rage (I once thought of it as a kind
of lovely). I think there is something in it to be studied.
Like a carburetor, she is flooded. I wait, open choke, crank
the throttle wide open. There’s always a violent answer
to which this language applies. I push the pedal down
to the floor, try and try to engage her. Small shot of ether
down the throat. Use a screwdriver in case she backfires,
protect my hands. She doesn’t sputter, doesn’t make
a sound. I kneel and stand, kneel and stand. It must be
something electrical, crossed wires. A hot engine of sobbing
I am, the first rule, not giving in. She’s the deadest kind
of battery, wreckage in the past must have ruined, and
now it strikes me that I am, in these fumes, also wrecked.
She is a crucial car, a futile car, an old combustion of
necessary fuel, brutal love, and faulty sparks. I turn
her off and on, off and on – but the mother won’t start.
The first two parts of “The Broken Mother Sonnets” appeared in Plume https://plumepoetry.com/2018/12/5-under-35/