My Father Has a Golden Voice

alright, 1 poem post per day, day 2. I'm exhausted from Maria's 450 workshop, so I'm just going to post the piece I performed at CUPSI 2009 (thank god for fifth wheel slams xD) More newer stuff to come. Enjoy!

My Father Has a Golden Voice


my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so,
down at his favorite bars,
relics of the recent past where
being in the mafia mattered.
the bartenders are boyhood friends, they
met joey ramone together, they
dropped acid and mesc. together,
they lifted weights together.
they were there before the weights
made my father stopped growing,
before he grew the mustache that
makes him look like a walrus,
when the electrocution scar stood
bare to the world, above the
pit-bull bites, and crooked
to the left of his nose.
that scar is a relic of infancy, of
curiousity turned into tenacity.
you see,
there are 120 volts in
your standard household socket
and it took all of them to seal
his lips even temporarily

my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so. they
scream for him to take the stage, to
mount the kareoke mike, to
belt out his best rendition of james blunt's
"You're beautiful.."
my father is proud of his range.
he started off with sergeant pepper's and
strawberry fields, but he has since expanded
swiftly, into the realms of ringtone rap and R&B.
though i cannot imagine this middle aged, mostly-racist
spitting the lyrics to "Informer" by Snow, or "Get Low",
shouting "till y'all skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet"
but he does this nightly
and they love it
and this is what he tells me
when he comes home drunk
at three in the morning

my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so
though I have never heard him sing
i barely even hear him speak
he's too busy
between two full time jobs and the bars.
I find that I can't blame the man,
who wakes up at 5 AM to haul garbage
to pay for my college education,
for anything-
though sometimes i can't help wishing
we were a family more visibly,
that we sat down to dinner occasionally,
and maybe didn't battle over bragging rights.

my father has a golden voice, and
and all his favorite women tell him so,
and here, we are using a loose definition
of woman, the same way we are using
a loose definition of father.
more of a roommate, really,
and my roommate brings home brainless blondes
with too much make-up, all fumbling
to take up the role of my mother; i wonder,
which of them will be here when he dies
i think about his dying often: the when, the why
the way the skin on his arms is infected, red
the way the blotches blossom below his knees
the way that stomach ulcers spring up after stress
like poppy plants
and that soil does not sing
it won't be forever.
he won't live forever,
not like this, there is a limit
to everything, to everyone,
even to my father.
I try to tell him this, but he never listens.

my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so
and you know what? I'm glad
everyone should have something
worth dying for