Notes for a Poem on a Broken Man

Something about your mother. Something about you in a scuba suit welding the base of a lighthouse. Something about secrets like frigid water. Something about a mako shark slashing your back with its fin. Something else about your mother. Something about bad decisions in your youth.  Something about fatherless men who wreck their bodies like cars. Something about unmedicated ADHD. Something about you flying through a windshield into a pickup bed. Something else about your mother. Something about sex, alcohol, and unregistered firearms. Something about you being too pretty for prison. Something about you lifting weights in minimum security until your slight body became a weapon. Something about you getting sent to supermax for crushing a wife-beater’s hands before they paroled him. Something else about your mother.  Something about your stories. Something about how the best storytellers are also the best liars. Something about falsehoods and how they protect us. Something about fictions and how they become us. Something else about your mother. Something about pirates who think they’re heroes. Something about white knights that are really Great Whites. Something about how truth gets lost in trauma, like a blowtorch dropped in the sea. Something about how love goes down with it.

You Didn’t Give Me Much, But You Gave Me the Gossamer Albatross

On the day I was born—June 12^th, 1979—Bryan Allen flew an ultra-light, pedal-powered aircraft across the English Channel in one minute less than three hours. To remain a breath above water, he had to pedal as hard as he could, and constantly. You told me this without reading the plaque as I stood behind you, arms draped loose at your waist (your body resisted tight embraces), our shared gaze lodged in the filmy white dragonfly wings of the craft strung from the museum ceiling. I imagined you airborne in that bicycle seat capsule, sweat making grey Vs on your white t-shirt as you pedaled for hours without thought, without emotion, borne away on the adrenaline cloud of escape. I still wonder if you flinched at my hands, avoided my eyes, because you had sensory processing issues, or because you were afraid of a solar-hot feeling that might—if you flew too close—melt the wax fusing your feathers to the frame.