Sons Of Surnames (Alternative Version)

A sixth of my life I've spent

never speaking a word to my mother.

Or my father.

They are not dead.

Dead silences are awkwardly honest;

it's the ones with breath in them that haunt.

Half my life I've whiled away

trying to be a son to parents

who razed two-thirds of it

questioning the anatomy of inheritance,

then spent the remaining third

issuing corrigendums on how to prove I was one.

Two-thirds of a lifetime,

assuming the past will let me call it mine.

The remaining third I've tried to outlive,

hoping to wake up someday

without the yesterdays

I've buried, still answering to their names.

You must unbecome inheritance to let your lungs inherit you.

But unbecoming is a violent subtraction:

pulling their surnames from beneath my fingernails,

scraping the shape of their jawlines off my own face,

refusing to let their history dictate the geometry of my spine.

How many fractions remain

when you divide a ghost from the bone?

Zero. And still, the lungs.

Sons Of Surnames

A sixth of my life I've spent

never speaking a word to my mother.

Or my father.

They are not dead.

Dead silences are awkwardly honest;

it's the ones with breath in them that haunt.

Half my life I've whiled away

trying to be a son to parents

who razed two-thirds of it

questioning the anatomy of inheritance,

then spent the remaining third

issuing corrigendums on how to prove I was one.

That's two-thirds of what one might call a lifetime,

if I were to transcend from present tense to past.

The remaining third I've tried to outlive,

hoping to wake up someday

without the ghosts of yesterdays

I've buried but couldn't exorcise myself of.

You must unbecome inheritance to let your lungs inherit you.

But unbecoming is a violent subtraction:

pulling their surnames from beneath my fingernails,

scraping the shape of their jawlines off my own face,

refusing to let their history dictate the geometry of my spine.

How many fractions remain

when you divide a ghost from the bone?

Just the zero it takes to breathe.

The Tongue Of Rot

Have you seen the flowers on a dead?

The colours, the fragrances, the patterns:

none of them as necessary

as the fact of decomposition.

They're not jewellery to embellish the embalmed;

only ever an honest submission penned in perishable petals.

Nothing speaks of rot as fluently as the biodegradable.

Flowers on a dead are words in a civilisation.

The God Gene

I've never seen a dog proud

because one of them, six decades ago,

went to space and died a martyr to science.

I've never seen a cat proud

because one of them, in a black coat of fur,

froze strangers in their tracks.

I've never seen a monkey proud

because its ancestors, a thousand years ago,

went to war for a god in fancy folklore.

I've never seen a hamster proud

because its grandfather, twenty years ago, 

helped three men share a Nobel, for killing him and calling it a breakthrough.

I've never seen a pigeon proud

because its grandmother, fifteen summers ago,

shat on a president's expensive shoulders.

I've never seen a bug proud

because one of its kind, once upon a time,

had a computer malfunction named after them.

I've never seen a virus proud

because its kind, for centuries,

sent thousands of humans to their graves, one deep cleanse at a time.

I've never seen a bonsai proud

because its father was a banyan,

though it barely passes for anything more than a hallway pleasantry.

I've never seen an amoeba proud

because it inhabits the very waters

artificial intelligence thirsts for every day.

I've seen us scream winning evolution, 

and pride in all of it anyway.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome

This might be for you if

you shat when you could have farted,

you farted when you could have just burped,

you burped when you could have just stopped swallowing junk.

This might be for you if

your asshole forgets adjusting

because your sphincter's dysfunctional

from your gut leaking god complex,

you gloriously replay all the times you shat,

not once wondering if a fart could have sufficed,

or maybe just an antacid.

This might be for you if

you and a public lavatory are one and the same

in tongue, teeth, ribs, spleen and gut,

and the other parts I forgot in farts;

you are never a good idea, 

but a desperate measure for a mild inconvenience, at best,

you mistake presence for significance, 

pants down for vulnerable, 

and when the air changes, 

you think stink is the smell of scripting history.

This might be for you if you're sure it isn't about you.

For My Own Good

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I remember the wooden scale.

I remember the stick.

I remember my mother's hand,

the kitchen,

the sudden importance of standing still.

Before that, there was an argument.

There must have been.

I had answered back.

I wouldn't listen.

I had been told.

I had been told.

I remember being told.

I don't remember what.

I remember what happened after.

The part before keeps changing.

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I remember the journey.

I remember why we were going.

I don't remember their faces,

their questions,

my answers,

whether my parents were in the room.

I remember my parents.

Perhaps I told them everything.

Perhaps I told them nothing.

Perhaps I told them what I had learned to call the truth.

Perhaps I was disobedient.

I have no memory of the verdict.

I remember being taken there.

Years later, I remember my mother feeding me.

The plate.

The meal.

Her hand bringing food to my mouth.

The wooden scale.

The meal.

The wooden scale.

She was feeding me.

She was hitting me.

I keep trying to put one memory after the other.

The meal before the hand.

The hand before the meal.

If she fed me afterwards,

perhaps I had been forgiven.

If she fed me beforehand,

perhaps I had been loved.

If I had been loved,

perhaps —

I don't know what comes after that.

Sometimes I remember being loved

and spend the rest of the day

trying to establish what that proves.

I have spent years trying to put the sound

in the right place.

Before the hand.

After the argument.

After I had been told.

I had been told.

I wouldn't listen.

I had answered back.

I had answered back.

Somewhere in the order

there must be a reason.

Somewhere in the reason

there must be a version of me

who deserved what happened.

I have not found him.

I have not stopped looking.

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I don't remember what I said to them.

I remember what I must have said

because I know what was wrong with me.

Difficult.

I don't know who first called me that.

Perhaps my mother.

Perhaps my father.

Perhaps the psychologists.

Perhaps I had already learned the word before anyone needed to say it.

Difficult.

The word fits inside the mouth 

without leaving a mark.

Years later, someone goes quiet.

I know this silence.

I begin again.

I reconstruct the conversation.

I revise my tone.

I find the sentence that might have sounded wrong.

I apologise for the sentence.

Sometimes I apologise for the tone 

I might have used while thinking the sentence.

Nothing has happened.

Nothing has happened.

I am relieved.

I hate how quickly my body understands.

I remember the wooden scale.

I remember the stick.

I remember my mother's hand on an ordinary afternoon.

I remember the meal.

I remember being told.

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I don't remember the misdeed.

I don't remember what I did.

I must have done something.

I had answered back.

I wouldn't listen.

I had been told.

I had been told.

I remember it was for my own good.

The Sanctity Of Appetite

When you hold a headless chicken in your hand,

its body spitting blood all over,

desperately hoping to undo the last two minutes of its life,

you don't look at the chicken and flinch,

you look at it as though this were simply how things are.

You don't think murder.

You think lunch. And dinner.

Breasts. Legs. Wings.

Sometimes, the chicken isn't chicken.

Sometimes, it's a man, a woman, a child.

Sometimes, the faith isn't food.

Sometimes, faith is a necrophiliac, 

dressing death up as devotion.

What you once called a meal, you now call a just cause.

Blood on the hands. Blood on the teeth.

An anaemic appetite that keeps gnawing for more.

Suicide bombers and serial killers

have thought themselves noble.

As have honourable men and women

slaughtering, in acts of faith.