Retrogressive Discrepancy
Michael J. Menges
The bleak prison-grayed walls of the
Bustation which have watched with
Cataracted Eyes the silent whimpers of
Old grey-haired infants still
Breast feeding from their (wine) bottles, now are
Pierced by a toccling man-child,
Waddling and searching, calling
“Mother” to emptiness and me, with a
High voice rolling like a fisherman’s
Net on the seas of steel-gray, unlike
My voice as I in crowded body-ful
Spacelessness ask a woman to dance
To the staccato that almost renders me a mute.
And she completes my falling heartbeat with
“No, thank you,” and my voice also
Tosses off a cliff with view-paralyzed
Muscle-tightening as the voice on the phone
Says “There is no one here by that name,”
Or the police station or garbage dump phone
Reply above the lie to my piece of hurriedly scribbled paper
By someone I had wanted something from, and
Someone had decided in the dungeons or towers of her will
To start me out with a bull-shot Magna Carta.
The clock waits a half minute for the upturned eyes upon head turned
Space, like my eyes on my desk waiting for the phone to ring ten times
Before I clock the onerous non-eternal warped ring-off,
Then the door marked “Women” opens, and two pairs of arms hug,
And he smiles, unlike my frown of clenched fist emotion paralysis
After a half hour of waiting for her of the no-show, and I can
(Can’t really), but in to vague clarity of recall,
feel the hugging in the staccato drumbeat closeness
Amid crowded bodies holding someone--her before she disappeared
going to “Introduce” (bull-shot my feelings) her “friends”
(Did they exist? Who knows in what time or space)
When she “found” them, and I have not
Found the flesh touching flesh as he
(The frozen anxious, now melted to relied) has grasped
Without streaking off a big bankroll or
Matching stylish clothes with a button unbuttoned
To shamelessesly expose his hairy chest.
“Will you tell me an exciting story, Mom?”
“Wait,” he breathlessly explodes, then
Bounces to the “Men” door, “I must go tinkle,”
Unworried of his expletive and of effect of
The hidden “No, no,” of the other; and he
Skip-runs to where Mother sits alone,
Waiting only for him and no one else,
Not like the inquisitive girl who set my
Motor and non-salacious daydreams churning,
Who left with the tall, richly dressed
Stop-start-at-nite-time talker
Who pounced on my bar stool (like an eagle on a rabbit)
Vacated by my extricated undigested dinner’s demands,
To also (take all) escape from me.
She tells him about dragons and knights,
(How many have seen the dragon in my armor?)
Alone, with no kibitzers or voices from the
Pick-up-and-ball Peanut Gallery.
“Finish it,” she says, smiling, approving
And with no watchful choosing of
Words, like Scrabble grabbing,
He speeds it to his smiling “ever after,”
With no hint of “I better get away
From that person fast” in her eyes.
He leans against her arm and sleeps
With arms untwined and that
“Will I be kicked out in the morning” thought,
Perception, worry foresight that mars a fleshly
Orgiastic night that comes too seldom and far between,
Is absent from their faces, and he will know
This ongoing love for a while, I hope,
As I do not know it yet,
And I stagger to the john to puke
And bathe my tears in Seagram’s Seven.
