Belated Bris of the Brainsick. Lucas Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ writes too many singsong rhymes.

      Too many times we have been belated.

      When he died, I started wearing Dad’s watch

      until the strap broke and it got lost.

      Idle hands operate on mundane memories:

      How I could never hula-hoop. Afternoons walking

      the track. A life-sized motorized Santa Claus

      of which only its pelvis moved. Air Cadet weekends

      tucked into a Windsor Park barrack three blocks

      from where my father was conceived. Do the things

      from which people protect you tend to be the very things

      you need? Then, an interruption—impromptu college

      lecture on criminal obstruction and the concept of mens rea.

      The PowerPoint says: ceci n’est pas un “PowerPoint,”

      but: For the mid-term exam, brainstorm a theory of life

      as the hardest, drunk scavenger hunt that [never] ends

      with the onion-skin myth of pearl-pure intent.

      II.

      Santa comes down the chimney and I vanish

      up it in a cloud of self-smoke. He calls his alternate

      troupe of elves who wear brown shirts

      and keep stricter lists than their merry master.

      I become the hot puff that beckons

      the neighbour kid’s asthmatic lung from within.

      Soon, coal will be the most prized gift

       You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s soot

      I steal a look into Santa’s sac of loot: an alp

      of children’s shoes, one stuffed with cold foot,

      a sit-in of dolls with eyes that don’t close,

      a mint of necklaces that could dry-drown any digger,

      grave- or gold-. Busy urban laundry room

      on Christmas so we go for a swim on the third floor.

      My friend pushes for the sauna. I say, Just a few

      minutes more? For, I have always panicked in steam

      rooms with those fuming showerheads and heart-

      heavy doors the non-existent locks of which I am certain

      will malfunction. My head is a mimetically sealed

      chamber I’d shut down if only learning I’m Jewish(ish)

      could have killed my catholic(ick) compunction.

      A performance artist once sliced onions with strangers

      until they could stop, be held and cry. Sentiment:

      another airborne disease to pantomime

      over salted-maple pecan pie and no-whip chai?

      I stick sweetly to the words that sorrow whispers

      into my thighs with perfect elocution: you may know

      the problem. You are not not not the final solution.

      III.

      Just a list of clichés about my cheap selfhood

      clattering like drunk Yahtzee or Boggle or Trouble

      or another game that’s louder than les manifestations

      casseroles. Dice fall out with no black dots.

      Boggle’s cubes settle down but show only Qu,

      X, W and other dead letters. In the mirror

      I see professional photographers whose boon was 2002.

      Getty Images must have hired them to retake

      stock photos of Manhattan air; I double-dog dared

      myself to snap a still pre-pill with morning hair—

      to take a picture that aims to conceal what only used to be

      there. The security guard says I am too fat to sit

      on a painted pony that does not move. Another

      mirror shows me the abandoned scaffolding

      of the most recently failed Oak Island treasure hunt.

      As I fall, may the skyline look like an architectural

      kaleidoscope. May I not have to remember Mies

      van der Rohe or bad trips. May I fall asleep

      on the way down to make the euphemizing

      of my eulogy and obituary easier. “He died peacefully

      in his sleep, surrounded by the wet-grey concrete

      modernism about which he felt ambivalent at best.”

      May I dream in that cattiest of naps that we had all

      risked more. That my Jewish dad might have reached

      down to me, honked my schnoz and flipped

      a kid script, taunting: You’ve got my nose.

      Obituary

      I would never write an obituary ahead of time.

      It would be written badly, adjective- and adverb-

      weighted to anchor you (or you) inkly to the ground.

      Self-fulfilling prof, you see? (Apologies.)

      My obit will not place paper dolls over wet wounds,

      will СКАЧАТЬ