Iguana Boy lays out his sadness at least
Like a man:
Uncompensated play …
The pain of unconsummated dreams …
Such a rich broth he stews in
Yet I can’t make the smoke blow away,
For I’ve been escorted in my day as well
From construction sites bearing insulation lungs,
No parents to teach me my value was zero
And no clue how to be, like the fool, carried over,
And I’ve done my children’s impossible math problems for
them
While they gloated from the kindness of another room
At how stressed,
when they requested me to do it, I’d become.
And I’ve felt every fiber that held me together
Break at the not-unkind words of a teacher
Who revealed how the world regards me.
And I’ve been enraged
At all the little queens and kings of the realm
When they scream to be protected from society,
But have backed off from ending their dreams prematurely
Though I wanted to scream myself, perhaps with them,
Like an executioner begs to be forgiven.
And I’ve cast myself adrift down indifferent streams
On a porous splinter, where there’s no more questions
Pity can answer, to be free of the shore where
They commiserate, and pluck off the garish blooms
From themselves and hand them over,
Every one of them a tear.
It’s inconceivable how unconditional one must be
When everything is naked, broken and wrong,
But that’s all there is, when being accepted yields so
little learned,
A world misconstrued, broken and wrong,
With no value in experience
Or wisdom gained from pain
And no one to oversee the rules who can be viewed
Only imagined.
How could I escape? From the one family?
The bubble in theory that saves what is mine
For me, and keeps others’ needs on the outside
In reality failed when I first tried to turn away
And saw the young astronauts fall to the void
On tethers that really did break
And I heard the hive mind remind me again
– In its kind computer voice – of my failure to act,
My intransigence at saving the doomed,
For they never were doomed after all, merely
Misplaced, free of time and space,
Rogues, just like me, forever learning how not to bend
But able to make a fire from what is.
It still warms,
Still is visible from far away,
Still offers a future of meaning.
There’s meaning in blue lights
And hair color products
But none yet, apparently, in the world.
