Oblivion Chicklets // Jeffrey McDaniel

A voice wants to know why I wasn’t there
the day the doctors splayed you out on the operating table,

You who carried me like a bouquet of splinters in your belly,
who let me suckle ambrosia from your coveted breast.

A voice wants to know how I can seal my heart up
like the lid of a submarine. The truth is I don't know

what's in there, and if I open that valve too quickly
the pressure might break me, might rip my ventricles

at the seams. When I saw you outside the methadone clinic,
half your teeth gone, I had to turn, couldn't watch

the family tree being hacked into more firewood.
Yes, I want to crush and snort the knuckles

of the doctor who prescribed you the oblivion chiclets,
but you're the one playing Paul Bunyan, swinging

the pill bottle like a plastic ax, and my tongue
is not a lavender ambulance rushing toward you. I know

reality is a mosh pit that keeps spitting you out, that beauty
seeps from your face like sugar from a punctured sack.

I know death is on the staircase, but you were a ghost
all along, an apparition with a wineglass

floating through my childhood. I know you were born
in a Polish neighborhood with an aluminum spoon

in your mouth, that booze runs through us the way
politicians run through promises. I know about the more

in morphine, what it's like to wake and feel like a chalk
outline of yourself. I know about days passing

so quickly that they don't even wave, let alone stop
and say hello. I know it’s been one of those months,

one of those lifetimes, when you dream of a laundromat,
a place to unscrew your skull and toss your dirty

thoughts into a machine, come back an hour later,
your impulses all folded and clean. If I could, I'd have a scientist

shrink me down and inject me into your bloodstream,
and I'd go with a wash brush and suds bucket,

scrub the opium out each one of your cells. I used to think
I was tough because I could hold a machine gun

of whisky to my cranium and take bullet after bullet
to the brain. I used to think the greatest display of strength

was lifting a hunk of metal in the air, but now I know
it's far more difficult to put something down.