The Stone Family
For my Father

One stone is in the pocket
of my baby blue jeans.
Another one seals my mouth with vomit —
sea-licked smoothness is not what it seems.
The third one is in my bosom,
layers of fabric, unhidden presence
that can’t be unnoticed by a woman
like an ellipsis at the end of a sentence.
One of the stones is deep inside —
its rough seeds, begotten, growing
have chosen the beating heart for disguise,
now my rib cage is eroding.

I can feel ‘em when I laugh
when I jump or run or breath in
so I cough and feed on ‘em like chaff
hoping it is not contagious for my next of kin.
The stones I carry once were apart,
lonesome, moss-coated, infantile
scattered around dim cloisters of my heart
but now they reign and I am in exile.
The way I inherited them is cryptic,
the ripe fruit of my genealogical tree
stained with my mother’s lipstick
and daddy’s role of the absentee,
my grandma’s wooden capsule
down in the raindrops-stained ground
worm-eaten is her shipwrecked vessel
now she knows how it feels to be drowned,
it could be that they carried stones
under their frocks and winter coats
like stray dogs yearning for the bones
now they are too hungry and aim for the throats.

For me — in and out —
my chest is clouded and temples drone
feeeling like a sixty-year old with gout
whose ability to feel is no longer known.
The scene of never-happened memory —
my dad on the building site,
orange helmet, bourgeois self-enmity,
the pile of red bricks benight
his disappearing silhouette
behind the scaffolding — is what I see
when cheap bourbon, regret and sweat
in my intestines decide to disagree.
Guilt transformes into salt in my eyes
failing again to reach the genuine,
to look up, to come up with the alibis,
‘cause I’m taught that anguish is feminine.
I count my pardoned by time loyal family
of stones whom I clutch as if the rosary,
blessed by their unwanted company.
They pave my crooked road ghostly
hence no one knows what I stumble on.
Inhaling sprouted by sinusitis,
nicotine, washing powder, living of a pawn
grants the outspoken syllables with arthritis,
it swallows the truth and breaks its back,
turning my mouth into a broken lie detector
until I beg my stones to crack
to spill their intoxicating earth-bound nectar.

Too heavy to allow me to pilot Spitfire,
too dead for a straightforward attack
too cold to send me to the pyre
too many of them ahead to look back.

Two stones in the soles of my shoes,
two on my palms to scare the gypsies
a huge one is in my mouth — the excuse
not to attend dates or cemeteries.
The stone-brought mist surrounds
my eye-lids, heart and veins,
so when the tears go out of bounds
I am sucked dry by a stone that remains.
A thought of liquorice childish faraway
of my dad’s faded photo in a frame
replaced by my very stones put on display
'cause at the end for me it’s all the same,
the sun would slap them with its rays,
dry them out like cored apples,
hoovering the acute malaise,
like in the nursery rhymes always happens,
flooding my dad’s image with colour,
turning him into a man I so want to know,
taking away from me that muller
that crept into me many lives ago.
But in reality I just pant and pant
with the battalion of stones in my lungs,
memory’s stolen, I own just an implant
so every night when darkness comes
I fool myself, the tomorrow’s successor.
The embryo of the thought when I lie down,
is that the stones could’ve been lighter and lesser
only if back then my daddy was around.