Thunder

Sounds like lightning
Looks like thunder

Three glasses positioned on the leathercreaking oldwood my grandfather gave my father.
I got it when both were dead or dying. (I’m a bastard son-
Saying so
at least until I am and regret it)

No matter what order I place the three glasses, I lift them with a timid hand. Uncertain,
I raise a glass and halt, thomp it down and lift another, thomp it and another.
Finally I sip the cobwebs.

I had a feeling. Thunder across my background hearing.
Escaped from the asthenosphere, volcanic clouds barrel mindlessly
in that place where shingles show as pebbles, and trees like soles of feet.
The tremors of woodframe windows shatter chipped paint to rest
upon the gutter of my windowsill. Telephones cold against my ear,
one dying, another dying, this one plugged and dying still,
it cuts my lobes like grad students take slices of pizza, lobes.
Like technicians spend two years prepping for the day they slice magnetically and automatically.
Like standing before thick glass, soundproof and speaking through an amplifier
wired through the ceiling past soundproof glass.
My voice coming tinny. Her voice coming thin.
Thunder coming humble,
thinking thunder’s me,
but isn’t, and is August manifest,
congealed in the atmosphere I breathe outside, choked by the vigor of an August storm.

I had a feeling…
This thunder is far too fucking timely. Sometimes, you know,
you have a feeling? You feel like

shit is choreographed? Strung together (up, along, out) by some maniac who hates you
and wants to see you squirm?

(God: What do you need now, boy? You punched your gut and kicked the seat from under.
You’re alone and drunk and in the mess you’ve made, boy. Call to me?
Grilling a grilled cheese?

Do you know what I hate? You, and your grilled cheese too.

See? You’ve burned it cuz you fuck up what you touch.
She’s crying. And you’re hard behind your face, teeth clenched; somewhere hard behind.

What you need is thunder, boy. Ho Ho Ho)

Thunder when tears begin, and the white of lighting past my ruined window.
See them take the place of what you’ve tried.

(Ha ha)

Is that you god?

It’s what I did and lightning.
--

And then the storm subsides, and calm takes up residence in place of banished spirit.
A pillar of mucus ascends the inner spire of my airtight tubes, climbing towards the source of gravity beneath my feat. It’s all a matter of perspective, so when I close my eyes and picture my beating heart -- the squelching labyrinth; inner parts -- I feel mucus climbing towards my gut, not sinking. I hear legions march; shamans calling dance;
a druid chain of keening adepts
screaming for my pulsing parts:
I hear them cough when I pull smoke,
gasp to stay afloat
the pull of gravity, towards the center where I don’t mean a thing,
and really,
outside of me,
this doesn’t mean a thing.

It’s not so bad a billion years from now,
all my atoms pulverized into components of carboniferous matter
springing again in the form of an unknown island
where some poor bastard meets life
out the womb of his bastard mother.

(It’s not so bad a week from now)

There beneath,
unknowing as I know

a bastard child aspirates
the thick dust his feet kick up
from floors of dirt his bastard father closed
in corrugated sheets of tin
liberated from garbage set aside
for life, liberty and
some other shit
that makes my problems grand
and real ones gone—

handed to bastard sons.