Before the Ear of the Great Spirit, a Statement

I want to be reborn.

Reborn as a gun that shoots sound.

The sound of Gods protruding from

the foreheads of statues with fixed gazes

from the minds of poets                                                                                 

with broken hearts.

The sound of a Volkswagen Rabbit

revving its engine,

like the kind my dad drove the night he “did it”

with my mom in a humid July heat, where

even the mosquitoes fly to Plymouth Harbor

to bathe in the salty night air.

He met her at a concert. His concert.

He was the drummer for the “Cape Cods”

who played schlock-standards in

country-club-cha-cha-2-4-time.

The kind of music that just might woo

my soon-to-be grandmother and not my

soon-to-be mother, who was a

salt-of-the-earth Goddess like her mother.

And this Scottish and French man.

He was a salt-of-the-earth type of man.

I can’t blame him for his choice in

music styles.

But my dad must have had style to make my mom

wait for him to finish his set. She worked

8 hours at a bakery. She’d stand in the corner

and sway to the slow beat, sipping a

Lipton iced tea from a can with a straw.

Thinking of the harbor.

What I do know is that I was born

nine months after that July night:

not as a gun but a long distance runner.

I heard the sound of a deadly bullet at the

starting-line and 5 times so far in this life

the finish line came closer. Then moved.

But I still hear the whiz of that bullet.

And I can hear the bullet

next to my ear like the hiss of a radiator

that takes forever to heat up.

In my next life,    no  more  running.

I want to be the gun that sends

runners to their ribbons.

And I will continue to make noise,

one of a small minority that won’t stay silent.

Mine will be the sound of projectiles;

they will ricochet and hide

among the book shelves.

Tolstoy will never find them,

Mickey Spillane will still be looking,

and Patterson will give up.