Maybe you wake up cranky again,
and the sun’s unwelcome as ever
through the broken slat in the blinds.
You holler across the hall,
You’ve got to make something of your life.
Then, he hardly stirs when you go to shake him,
but he tells you of his plan to kill you.
There’s no use talking it out.
No coming to some understanding.
He means it this time
Sometimes, I get crazy thoughts myself—
I’m too old for this.
What’s left of my youth
has leached out slow like air from a tire.
How murder is where we come from,
Cain and Abel, the Flood, and then the Golden Calf—
which was only a sign of our shared impatience.
So, you take him to some tangled place
and it all unwinds like a movie,
part of you watching, and part of you
present in a way you’ve never been.
Maybe you’re hoping some voice intervenes.
You’d gladly call it God, if the script requires,
though you’re probably considering the headlines,
the generations to come who might never understand.
Or, perhaps, there is no voice.
and it's just you, come to your senses.
No matter. Chances are he’ll only remember
a trip to the country, just a kid and his dad.
A nice enough day, the story might go,
except for maybe this cheap device
that never would solve anything:
the bleat of another innocent animal,
caught in the brambles, ready or not,
to take our place.
Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. From Arroyo Seco Press, In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars. The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading.
