Sweet Child

by Frank Rubino

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Not competitor, not utility, sweet child of mine.

Love has no object.

The peacock spider, I never heard of it,

this Wonder, this Marvel,

I never heard of it before.

The rhino fish, I never heard of it before.

The ape hound, I never heard of it,

the coon cat, the grass fly.

​

Not advisor, not saboteur, sweet child of mine.

Love fixes no role, makes no guarantee.

The wolf man, I heard of him,

his uncontrollable change,

like when Mom transformed at lunch,

under her fast-turning metamorphic spell.

Feel guilty, feel angry, feel shameful, feel rage-ful,

collapse on linoleum.

I hand her her pocketbook,

coax her to find the money she'd promised

as she cried on the floor.

It was the hundredth time, and a hundred times more terrible,

but I need that quarter Mom!

The kids are stopping at Carl’s for football cards after school.

​

Not quizzing everything but in solution with it all.

Not combinator, not divisor: container that pockets

an anomaly. The singular contains the divisible,

like a silver coin exploding pennies.

The glove mouse, I never heard of it.

The dance-foot-arch-face, its yearning for sex.

The climbing bat, the whip-tail deer,

I never heard of it.

Not desire, not want neutralized, sweet child of mine.

Can love exist without desire? Without revulsion?

The bottle-broke goat, the rusty-touch rat,

I never heard of it before.

​

While Dad napped on the lounge

that folded and nipped my fingers if I'm careless,

I snuck a drink from his beer.

He’d dropped his cigarette butt in the can,

in the swill at the bottom

of his Schaefer. Dad's Pall-Mall ashes:

I didn’t know, I just saw the grown-up beer can, my sleeping father.

I slurped it in, the butt a shocking mass like when you’d swallow an ice cube,

gray ash paste spreading cancer in my throat.

I wanted to wake him and tell him I’m sorry,

I’m gonna die from cancer poison,

because I broke the rule and was a sneak,

that afternoon beside my sleeping father in terror of death