when he could have accepted, lied
when he had a chance for truth, disappointed
instead of fulfilling her meager dreams,
ignored all her frail and weak moments
when he didn't offer enough of his own strength.
He's almost screaming now–howling into the horn
how he wants his Momma, his Ma,
his Mommy.
His number's on the Caller ID.
I leave the phone
off the hook and listen to his haunted murmurs
from across the room,
figuring I'll call him back
some night in the second week of May.
by Tom Piccirilli
First of all, I didn't even know he was Sicilian
until my mother died,
and my brother is talking to the priest, telling him
about our parents, the priest wanting to know,
making an issue here, needing to discover if they were
good
Catholics,
you understand, the man hoping to ascertain if they were good
people, good enough to be put in his ground,
although the Sicilian had already been in the earth thirty years.
And the priest asks where our father was born,
and my brother says Sicily, like that.
There shouldn't be another complication at your mother's funeral,
you should not have to bear more hardship,
you should not have to lift yourself off the ground
of yet another impractical revelation.
Here I am, 37 years old, and I had no idea.
The priest walks in
off the street, and he finds out about my Dad,
about my name,
but me, I'm standing the top of a mountain of graves,
I've been burying my blood since I was seven, but me,
this is the first time I'm hearing about this.
My father was from Sicily.
These are two blows cleverly concealed to appear as one–
it proves how little I know of the man,
and how little I know of me.
A dozen novels, two hundred stories,
a million words unfounded in a moment.
I've been
talking about truth, telling you all about truth,
sharing the truth of myself,
and I am as much a stranger to it as any of you.
I took down the man's scrapbook again–
peered at his sixteen-year-old face in the Philippines,
the magnificent youth that I never was,
the
hep
cat hero attitude in his
swabbies
,
cigarette tilted from his sweet lips.
I've been through
these pages fifty times in my life,
comparing, considering,
contrasting and correlating,
measuring,
pondering,
and still I've missed it.
There's a yellow letter here falling to dust,
the paper so worn that the words can hardly
be made out:
the thing is,
it's written by him,
by the Sicilian to his buddy,
talking about
staying low and kicking the
Japs
' asses,
sending them running back across the Pacific.
So look, over here
at this: something else I've never realized before–
it's written by him...by the man,
so why's he got it in his own scrapbook?
Fifty times and I've never seen it before,
but there,
in faded ink
are the barely perceptible words he read
at sixteen,
when his letter to his buddy came back:
deceased
return to sender.
I can consider and correlate,
contrast the thickness of the hair on my forearm
to his,
measure the cap size and shoe size,
endlessly ponder the grin,
but when it comes down to it,
I can never,
really, any longer
compare.
by Tom Piccirilli
-a-
We walked around her backyard discussing school
while her mother and sisters and aunts and grandmother
flowed behind us like a wedding train
of polyester.
She tugged me forward and I tugged her back
and our lips met.
Grandma yelled in Italian
and came charging.
It made me think.
-b-
We were on the floor of her college dorm room,
the music next door so loud that I could barely focus
and find what the hell I was aiming at.
She said
my name and it sounded so strange that I thought
she was talking about someone else.
Whoever he was,
he made me angry.
-c-
She was cheating on her husband and liked me
because I would listen.
She had a laugh designed
to turn everybody's head.
She'd use it on me
even under the sheets, like she was trying to call
anyone else nearby into the room with us.
Her
husband phoned twice and she used it on him too.
-d-
I'd met her in an ice cream parlor, lost touch
for twenty years and ran into her again at a party.
She called me Neal in the shower, then apologized,
then called me Neal on our second go-around.
At
3am she thought I was sleeping and phoned Johnny
and told him how much she hated Neal.
-e-
She was cheating on her husband and liked me
because I would listen.
We spent New Year's
watching a Stark Trek marathon while he decided
if he was gay or not.
They were in counseling
and he was having fantasies.
She said she didn't like
the idea of it.
Neither did I.
-f-
I was drunk and so was she, and we grabbed a bottle
and headed back to her place.
We started going at it
on her couch, and when I looked up her three kids were
standing in the doorway saying they were hungry.
In
about five minutes they were calling me Uncle Tommy and
asking if I was moving in.
I left her the bottle.
-g-
We spent all our days and nights together for a month,
laughing and enjoying life again, whispering about marriage,
about how it had been a long fight but worth it all
so we could find each other.
Her father hated my guts and
said my hands were soft.
He took a poke at me with his
welder's fists.
I flattened his ass, and that was the end of that.
-h-
Please, she said, I want to see your poems, so I showed her.
She didn't want to see them, instead she wanted to show me
hers.
One was about a bad love affair with a needle freak.
Another where she screwed three Harlem Globetrotters
one night.
Another where she wanted to be cut to the bone.
She asked what I thought and I told her we should be friends.
-
i
-
She was cheating on her husband and liked me
because I would listen.
She told me all her dreams and fears
and asked me mine.
I had plenty but couldn't quite get them
out.
The more I tried the more it hurt.
I took a walk in the park
and fed the pigeons.
I was starting to think that maybe I should
listen less and start talking more.
by Tom Piccirilli
I was inside for a time and given my own bed, in a line
of nuthouse munchkins, all of them so damn chatty
and almost as bad with the questions as the doctors,
hip with the flattery, everybody trying to get inside
my head, as if
that's where they wanted to be.
Trying to see
through my eyes, to paint the world with my palette,
all of them looking for my notebooks
under the pillow,
in the mattress,
beneath the plants on the windowsill.
Feeding me purple pills, the nurses took down their notes
and I took down mine,
and the paranoia caught fire across the ward, these ladies
wondering what I'd put down,
if I was a liar, if I was sane
enough to notice their cold hands on my wrists, the sweet
depth of their blatant voices
that gave me chills.
We circled one another like dogs,
trying to see what could be seen,
trying to beat each other at the same game.
90 days later they cut me loose
and stood trembling
on the stair with a palpable despair, wondering what
I would dare speak of on the page,
of my rage, of how I got so sick
and how I grew well
in their cleanest
cage, what I would bare, what I would tell,
and what I would never speak of again.
Let's put it this way,
I'm over here
and they're all still there