A Seven of Sonnets

A while now, I have tried to keep from writing
pentameter. It's like a habit I've
been trying to kick, when every foot in five
steps down a line. It's like a jones I'm fighting,
 
the cigarette I stop myself from lighting,
a deathwish my addiction keeps alive,
but I can’t help myself. Do I derive
warped pleasure from my versifying, the biting
 
& chewing of my musings into neat,
pre-packaged utterances? & Since when
is truth a tally of iambic feet,
enumerated rigidly on ten
quick-bitten digits? Why do I repeat
this pattern? Shit, I’ve just relapsed again.

You were the queen of the arcade, fast talk,
quick temper, darling of my college days –
When your entanglements betrayed a maze
of dead-end arguments, you’d take a walk
 
(a-wawk-a-wawk-a-wawk-a-wawk-a-wawk...)
Then double-back with a voracious phrase
to turn the tables on that hungry gaze,
an adolescent male's unpleasant sulk.
 
You were the campus deity of choice,
an Aphrodite to the lucky few,
A Circe, a Diana, to rejoice
in the luckless pining of your retinue.
 
What appetite, what love allowed your voice
the art to turn the men around you blue?

I was privileged to be able to buy
my first electric on 48th street,
an Epiphone, black with flat-wounds & amp.
Then I swapped a bag of amphetamines
 
for a Rickenbacker with slanted frets.
Sacrificed a grand on a new Gibson.
Oh Where are the six strings of yesterday?
One walked at a party. Another flew
 
to California. The last one quit me
for a drummer I used to know. I went
down to the crossroads, held out my hand,
 
& waited for the touch, a new tuning
a bent note, a wicked chord, a pitch fork,
singing, timor mortis conturbat me.

I walk in as my mother plays "A Long,
Long Way From Home" from memory. The keys
kneel gracefully beneath her hands, the song
 
obeys her touch with such apparent ease,
that I am marveling at her technique,
not the progressive state of her disease.
 
While playing, she can keep in tempo, speak
coherently, & smile. She must have played
the same piece every day of the week.
 
Away from her piano-barricade
she'll talk as if the words do not belong
to her, but to Alzheimer’s, to trade
 
a gesture or a fluting of her tongue
for once familiar melodies gone wrong.

Spill enough acrylic, no one will see
the raw linen, no one will say, his bones
protrude, a pitiful apology
 
for his loss, no one will say this atones
for cost projections cast a cold eye, horse-
man, no one will say a paint stick postpones
 
his pointillist apocalypse, restores
our faith in rehab, no one will say, shit,
this is good shit. Neither artists or whores'
 
men, no one will, say, willingly submit
to his hypodermic drill-bit of pay-
dirt, saying what no one will say for a hit
 
too fatal for this skeletal jockey,
mainline, pure, uncut. No, no, one will say.

Have a seat. Sit anywhere you like. If
the first one's taken, take the next in line.
If that one's taken, the next is fine.
Oh Come. Consider the alternative.
Do you want to stand until you're stiff?
Consider your feet. Consider your spine.
Take your pick of mahogany or pine.
The selection here is superlative.
We fully guarantee satisfaction.
Fifteen settings, & easy to master.
Just turn it on and say goodbye to pain.
We call this one Lavender Disaster.
Each of our chairs is wired for action.
We've never heard a customer complain.

Victim is of indeterminate race,
male, thirty-three, a simple homicide,
no clear identifying marks, aside
from evidence of torture to the face,
 
back, abdomen. Another look betrays
a lateral incision in the side,
six centimeters deep & half as wide.
The lab results will take a few more days,
 
but judging by the trauma to both wrists
& ankles, an orderly could guess the cause
of death. The autopsy, as such, is done.
 
Still, it will take a team of specialists
to ascertain exactly who this was.
A father, possibly. Somebody’s son.