POEM FOR MY MOTHER
My mother sits with her legs apart
Her useless freckled arms are shaking
Yellow liquid drips down her leg
through a tube, into a slowly filling bag
"Fine," she says, "fine",
"Where's Daddy?"
Her ugliness enrages me:
the incessant little grunts
the fixed eyes
the bad smell
How dare she become a monster!
Oh mother,
where is your talcum powder
your footsteps playing the stairs' piano
your chemical anger
your liveliness, a fountain in the sunlight?
Why does she hold so fast, like a scab to skin?
She should do the decent thing
and die
A risky climbing of the inner ladder
escape through the open eyes
hold her breath
and go
She cannot do it
She is falling slowly backwards
her head hitting the rungs
becoming a chimpanzee, then a lizard
a lichen on a rock
in some cold stream