That's how bad her family was:
Petty burglaries, cabins set on fire,
Peeing from hotel balconies,
And some real shit thrown in too:
Suing people to death, victimizations
In offering prospectuses, shenanigans
To finagle destitute children,
Pretending to be the bass player for Sublime,
Trying to take the home of a widow ...
They make messes wherever they go,
Kick a poet out of their home
Even as he helicopters their starseed baby
Who's in the midst of a blessing
On their morning-after pool
With a cadaver's bouquet of plastic flowers.
The lies never end,
The duplicities pile up like stools,
They never stop touching your stuff
Like a mobster until there's no more stuff to touch.
And it's worse inside the family --
The psychopaths win every time,
So they all turn into psychopaths
By shaming or maiming
And break if there is an inkling
They are not the Lords of the Realm
Or have made one mistake
Or set off an alarm.
Every decision involved in
Living your life on earth
Must have an invoice attached,
And every time you give more to others,
Divine cosmic messenger, than yourself,
You're made to retrace your steps
And badger some innocent clerk
Until you get your way, no matter what it takes.
It happened to me, a day in court
To advocate for what I had no right to or interest in,
The opposing side begging us to take everything
Just to live our lives without the swirl
But I had to persist, because I knew
The retribution for resistance, as I knew
The judge would take one look at us
And say "not homeless."
It was always like that, you had to steal towels
For the good of the tribe before 6 am,
And learn to not give back your cards
At the kiosk; they were saving them up
Like timeshare presentation swag, for the pain
Of being forced to endure what makes a sad clown
Cry, again and again, a commissioned beggar
Pleading us to buy what we cannot afford
For a jetski ride we'd never take, meals we would have
Refused to eat, there with the laminated brands
On the tables of pity, as the day's sun moves away
On a gated enclave in the middle of nowhere ocean.
You drew the line at the cows,
Flies always covering their eyes
On that ridiculous ranch. You refused to budge
To receive your legatee birthright, that hacienda
To sneer at all the vaqueros
Who work for tip change
When your father feels like
Letting them.
All of it fell away on the day of your death,
Your long-suppressed hatred for your evil step-mom,
Your dad still gaslighting why would he need to repent?
Your broken siblings, as fucked over as they were greedy,
And how your first marriage fell not because what
You had told me, the dangers of beer and of not being chosen,
But because this kind man could not endure any more
Of what she'd brought along with her:
The tending of tawdry coins as logs on the hearth
Of humanity, as strictly a stomping upon, and laughter,
As they eat Fritos with spoons while hunted tule elk
On the walls avert their eyes,
The game within the game within the game
Whose only rule was he always had to win
And always had to cheat, and we always had to pretend
We burned with hatred for him at having lost.
Oh but we were given things, like that tiny corner
Of the family vacation cupboard, the place where you
Suffered the worst, as they stole all your food
And shamed you for not sharing the one thing you had.
Can I say I had fun? Sure. I saw a moon blue
In the sky as my heart sank, and the pink on the walls
Was a beautiful howl, of wanting the best for everyone
But watching as everyone was rolled.
I saw the distant eyes of Mexicans beyond the gates
Having to see everything. You, on the other hand
Held your ground, maintained your crystalline architecture
And courageously denied that your integrity needs a defense.
They hated you for that. That your soul was not theirs.
That there was nothing in it for them. Ah, but there was me
To make a puppet so I had to sever every string, and lost you.
Have a great day! I have no more healing venom.
