in the industrial trenches

If I could be just like a young babe, curling my toes on the couch,

playing with keys, sunlight through the window strikes. Rain.

The darkness. The secret sermons in basements

where they hid from the women, the 'eastern stars', the southern hair.

The lodge was solace and deception, You saved flavored tobacco in pipes, in the garage.

Always garages, of metal and trinkets and toys for the elder men.

Always crummy foods of packaged and processed, the spam, the Cheetos,

the canned and waxy vegetables. I look away. You mow the yard.

What is that black, that void when I close my eyes and all is lost beyond the grave?

I must have died during the birthing process.

Left a hole large enough to escape from and yet never returning to.

This flesh born of my mothers, this skin grown in a womb dish like a baby pup,

the wad of goo growing arms, growing legs – when does life begin?

When the sperm hit the egg; it never became anything.

Like snapshots of summer, stacking in our subconscious.

Lemonade stands and death in the streets.

Fire hydrants and 4 a.m. Gunshots, the drunks around the corner up all night

high on cocaine and shooting guns into the air.

My father was never a country boy but pretends he was, on the edge of the mechanical city,

the industrial suburb, the steel nights, the pipes breaking.

The air is thick with working gloves, safety gear, and sweat.

They slave in the factories, like animals tied to posts, strapped to machines to feed their babies.

The lies of the founding fathers, keeping us locked in the trenches, keeping us at each others throats. The sweat of the grandfathers at the chemical plants, the wrench turners, the odorous clouds,

they push me down to their level.

He has a book book cover over his I-pad, tells me how him and his wife still read,

how he carved a hole in the book to propose. She likes science fiction. They compliment each other;

he explains interlocking puzzles.

I tell him how my grandmother has become infantile, her generation of meticulous categorization.

How the twenties bred an organized state of placement.

File cabinets were labeled, coffee cans, labeled bins, bowls with names,

and specific items for a specific purpose.

Back when the goods were sparse and to buy a couch or table or something other meant – forever.

They kept their household belongings forever.

Even their spouses.

Til death do they all part.