First, a moment for Kurt Vonnegut.
Second, another poem. I promise eventually their will be something other than bad prose poems, but thanks to my writing teacher, who is more impressed by prose poems than verse poems or anything that resembles verse, I've spent a lot of times this semester experimenting with prose poetry. I smushed this one together into prose and liked it better that way. So it goes. So it goes.
Fall 2006
The leaves fall and change, infecting each page and each day, each love and each way, falling vertical like the seasons and bar codes, strangling the modern man into submission where he stands, where he falls on to the pile of leaves in the front yard wishing he were young again for a while.
The trees stand tall and bend, they don't break like the man, who holds his woman’s hand and fends off other suitors so he can build his white picket fence and fill his drive way with cement and his kids will sign their names and imprint their hands and it'll outlast the change, snowfall and rain, outlast the painful divorce and hours of remorse, hours crying on a pillow at night, squirming and screaming all broken and falling - all sad driving back to mommy's house after a weekend with dad - that painful, awkward silence and exchange of kids like their goods, not something you did together, bound under one roof forever, bound like soldiers and slaves - or are they same? - bound together, bound for some buried treasure on a hot, twilight sea, under the stars, man and wife to be, hand outstretched reaching for the heavens, unafraid of death and all the bad things awaiting under the eclipse, cause this life is fixed - they're destined to fail after this fine sail, this desert island fantasy only leads to life in some shanty - some beautiful, disgusting white picket fence, two story, four bedroom, three bath, pool and spa, prefurnished mess in a nice quiet neighborhood, surrounded by fake smiles and the leased luxury cars of doctors and lawyers divorced three times, unable to even commit to a car for a few years, it's only nickels and dimes, hiring some illegal immigrant to make his baby shine like another mirror to stare back into and watch how disfigured and diminished and empty his soul has become, faded and fallen like the leaves on the front yard and the oncoming breeze and talks with the kids about the birds and the bees, all awkward and uncomfortable now, missing some former self, some how less a man than one used to be, less at home and more at sea, staring at the woman laying down at his side on this old water bed where we made the kids and said all those "I love you" things we really didn't mean - things we never understood and should have saved for the kids.
The kids who we've shipped far away to some overpriced college where they're hid from the mess we've become and someday they'll become because life is a cycle and we never recycled because we never really cared and because everything was perfect till now, in bed, staring at the ceiling, more alone and barely believing that this is where life is and will be - this is life forever, like that promise we made, another lie that we said in front of God and everyone, cause "I do" and I did, but now I miss the kids and I'm afraid they're more like me and my father, why did we even bother?
They've got a destiny, they're just like me, that's who they were meant to be and it hurts when they don't call because I know they're making the same mistakes I did and they'll feel the same heartbreaks and some day they'll lay next to a woman who they hate, just like their broken father; their soulless, empty father washing his face, praying he can somehow wipe it away and get out of this place, this disgrace of a life, this battered and disgusting mess he calls home, that woman he calls wife - did he give it his best or did he just fall, change like the leaves and ignore it all, ignore his kids and all the things he did, all the people he ran over, all the emptiness he feels as he rakes the leaves in the front yard.
