The Sweetest Baby I'll Ever Have

For Christopher James Hirning

Your voice deepens
through the phone lines
stretching across states
across time:
you've grown and I
have not been there,
know your baby years
my little brother
much better than your years
of awakening, this slowly
coming into consciousness.

Now you tell me about
computer games I've never
played, soccer matches you
don't always win, the story
you are writing for a school
assignment, you know more
about the internet than I ever
will, you say you are really into
"grunge music."

It's funny how you remember
that accident you had on my
watch, maybe because it scarred
me so, I talked about it too much:
we were playing that game where
you slid off the couch into my arms
and when your face hit that awful
marble coffee table, I screamed
and frantically felt for your poor
baby-teeth through the blood,
to make sure they were still there,
before I went to the neighbors for help.

And it is painful
growing out of little-boy
bones into facial hair and
that cracking voice I hear
when I call home.
It's painful to miss this,
to not be there to help you
with algebra or your first crush.
I almost wish I knew how
to stop your growing up, or turn you
back to two-years-old,
for one last bath and bedtime story
for a maternal me at twelve years
old and for the sweetest baby
I'll ever have.

ALittleBitMore on the Magic Man

She's the best one that we've ever had
She sits on her hair and she's tall as my dad
And she tie-died my shirt
and she pierced her own ear
And it's peace, man, cool, yeah, the babysitter's here

Her boyfriend is Tom but we call him the king of romance
He wears an American flag on the butt of his ripped up pants
And will they get married with kids of their own?
He says "Not if she's going to college we won't"
And he kisses her, oh someday I'll have a boyfriend just like that...

But it's Saturday night,
I can't sleep, and we're watching the news
She says "Do me a favor,
don't go with a guy who would make you choose"
And I don't understand, and she tries to explain
And all that mascara runs down in her pain
Cause she's leaving me, oh
~"The Babysitter's Here" by Dar Williams
http://www.darwilliams.com/index.php?page=cds&family=music&category=CD&display=82
http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/d/dar_williams/the_babysitters_here.html

If I'm the slightest bit hormonal, this song can make me almost cry. It reminds me of how I looked up to my babysitters when I was young, and it recalls to mind what I went through with my own "king of romance." I love how it's written from the perspective of the kids, with child-like lyrics (and notice how it neatly ties in with my last post, about my potential new business).

And so, a few poems written from that awful time in my life seem called for, recently revised with 19 more years of writing experience and life perspective. This hopefully made them a bit better, although I suspect there's a certain adolescent anguish that I wasn't able to (maybe wouldn't want to) remove. It's scary to put full poems out here, especially such old and immature ones, but - big breath and - here goes....

I Take It Back
How I said I could
bear it, because I can't!

I want to tear my hair out
and scream and lay down
my love-hate before you like a
delicious dish of your favorite
flavor of ice cream.

I want to run to your forbidden
space and give you my arms
to make a circle around your ears,
give you my hands to kiss with those
dry, cracked lips, in need of Carmex
or Vaseline or my tears.

I want to give you my own smooth lips
and my words of love
stale as two-year old potato chips.
And my soggy desire
like Cheerios left too long in milk.
My regard for you as fragile
as a dirty shirt made of silk,
needing to be dry-cleaned on Monday.

I want to give you one almost-sincere
apology for wanting more
than those beery nights and
chronically gray
days which I fear
I will never escape if I stay.


Watch It Fade*
There it is, the twist,
the turn, of thorny love.
It rolls over
on its side and becomes a beast
a destructive storm descending
wrath from above.
I just barely escape
and I watch
electric flashes from the shore.
I do not want this empty
copper-tasting
remnants of passion
I want calm blue
bitterless waters
like love I had before.

*inspired, at least in part, by a scene in a Louise Erdrich novel, though I can't remember if it was Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, or Tracks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Erdrich