Pizzle

 

Pizzle

 

Words, we’re told, are ours to own once we’ve known

them three completely independent times – listen:

the first time is a wash an auditory wash maybe an

eyecup wash how the whole bowl is closed over

the hollow & the offense is coaxed & cajoled &

hopefully wholly until finally the tiniest of piece

is rivered away and what remains is stored away.

 

Today is a birthday of a man I was once married

to a man I took to & should not have but I did, I had no

eyecup I had no hearing aid I only had my naivete

I had nothing else I went out into the weather

of it unprepared & he opened my coat in a blizzard

& I froze to death there.  No not to death but he

bent me and I broke against his heel. Struck, 

he walked off while I cradled my remains.

 

Today, the word I read in two different places two

different genres – one Drunk on Genocide and one

“The Weavers” – a poem, I didn’t expect it in 

the poem but I did in the description of whips used by

the Nazis – tell me: who but some kind of sadist

makes a dick into a whip?  It’s got to be some kind of

coincidence, reading this on his birthday, and all this

time having gone by without so much as being

 

in the same town or a city or even sometimes a country

this past quarter of a century.  

Some comfort must be taken, by force if needs be,

for letting a thumb of a different lover stumble and 

hover above that scar in the dark, & then, because

edges are made to either be stepped back from or jumped

off of, choosing the nudge, the lift of the hip

where in the clavicle of the bone, where the hurt has been

nurtured to the nerve, and choose, when the sounding

abates into the distance, give it over, give it entirely

over and be talked toward from the reverberating crack.