On Mother’s Day by Robert S. King

Years after I last saw you
posed in a silk-lined box,
I try to remember you gliding
through younger days. I try to recall
things you said, your accent, gestures,
what caused a smile and what broke
your heart into pieces of burning coal.

But what I remember most is last
when you changed into someone
no one knew, when you changed me
into someone new while every heart
around you pumped tears and shadows
glided lost along the walls.

I curse Mother Nature that one must die
in pain, curse the locomotive on which we
labor and pass away. I hurt that in the end you
did not know me or yourself. You fell into
the furnace of your own heart, trying to stoke
from it another beat, just this last labor after all
the fires you tended, after all the ashes
you scattered settled down in the ashcan of hell.

Despite disbelief, I pray:
May hell be no more than a dream we pass through.
Beyond it, I hope you have found another
body to fit your peaceful soul.
But from my window, not even
your last breath was gentle.
It labored more like the clack
of trains fading into the distance.

Like Father by Robert S. King

My son has my eyes, but not yet my vision.
He denies I can see through him,
tells me how blind I am,
how hard to breathe it is
when I’ve sucked all air from the room.

Men offer tough love, but don’t say that word,
just its euphemism of “what’s best for you.”
It’s the kind of love that makes money
of the world, testosterone of tenderness.
I have already spent my future,
spent everyone in it.
My eyes burn with clarity.

You can see it in his eyes,
how there’s no time like the present.
He chooses a wife as costly as himself,
a southern bell to give him hell,
like him, one who wants it now,
he says one who nags for now.
Soon his apologies are the only currency for sex.
Soon he feels money would be cheaper.
He slips out with a pocketful of anger,
swivels the barstool toward a closer, fruitier perfume.

Tonight Peaches is her given name, a fog of fragrance and gin,
dolled up in shiny, fuzzy hair and rouge over the bruise.
Peaches can’t forgive either her father or her ex
(twins she calls them)
but warms to his staggering new cologne of Old Spice and rum,
this one of such tightly focused eyes.
She just wants a free drink and a lover with a long future.

And so the future goes.
He drinks more and goes home less.
He talks less and stalks more.
He chases every face that shines,
except the mirror.