Poetry: Levi J. Mericle

​Family Reunion 

By Levi J. Mericle
QuailBellMagazine.com

*Editor's Note:  "Ode to the Drunkard that Wanted Me" was first published in Blackheart Magazine and Zaira Journal.

To the Grandmother that Never Cared
My compassion for you is like a vodka stained liver
Like a quivering litter of puppies that heard their mother die to the stuttering sound of life
while pushing out the lightning bolt of birth.

 
And at night I unearthed the moon again just to watch her die away a little more.
Like my compassion for you.
 
My compassion for you is like the sizzling bullets between our bones.
As strategical stones align the footnotes of my bed like a riverbed of memories
I will not be remembering.
 
This December in my tone as cold as the telephone you couldn’t pick up to call me back.  
You lacked the certain pentacle of devotion like an ocean of family we should have been
 
but were not.
 
My heart still sunburnt by the thought of rays like happiness
a grandmother’s love should excrete.
 
But these concrete grave markers mark the territory of our story,
 
grandson and grandmother.
 
So yes…
 
I shudder to think of us.
Yet there was never much to be thought of.
You are just a face my eyes visited once every decade or so.
 
And as the snow piled like the memories I wish we had,
 
I can gladly say I’m happy.
 
Happy that my compassion for you has quickly diminished.
 
Because I was just merely a storybook
 
                                                              –that you could never finish.
 
                                                                                                                       
A Misconception Between Muscle and My Faith
Father threw his tongue at the television set.
Hoping his slanderous insults would stick.
 
“Men pretending to fight in cages, wearing diapers, how stupid can we get?”
 
You see my father was a Bible thumper.
A praise the Lord,
curse and you’re going to burn,
believe what I believe or learn kind of preacher.
 
Bleeding the gospel dry for every drop of salvation he could get.
Because he needed to believe.
 
Well, I believed in what I could see.
To me at that point god was a fictional character
A storybook pawn if you will.
 
My heroes were super-human
A visual component of muscle
 
Jesus was slim fisherman.
 
I would have put God in the ring against Foley or Hogan any day,
Just to watch entertainment win over glory
to remake my idea of righteousness.
 
Oh, and of course to see God shirtless.
 
That was my envisioned American dream.
 
 
Ode to the Drunkard that Wanted Me
The anvil of your breath was pressed to my lips by force.
 
A link of chain, chain length in size grouped your neck
with barely an inch to spare. Your body-grease-covered arm tattoo,
 
amused me ever so slightly. But I guess
a naked woman with a snake tattooed on her ass
could make any young boy laugh.
 
Your teeth rotted like a spoiled avocado, smelt spicy with the tinge of vomit.
Your clothes drenched in sweat, cheap liquor, and the willingness to rape.
You fondled my sense of security, 
gyrating your words in my direction.
Your erected smile followed me with every move I made.
And believe me I made very little, if any.
 
Your slightest touch made my teeth shiver.  
Quivering like a mermaid on the end of a sailor’s harpoon.
 
What was this dream I entered?
My first kiss, kissed by you a drunkard.
You’re nothing to me but an echo in my nightmares,
A gremlin in my sea of Gizmo’s,
A locket around the drowning neck of time.
In that moment, in this life and the next.
 
I didn’t hate you and I still don’t hate you.
Just the thought of you I hate to think.
 
But I know I must.
 
And I know I will.

#Unreal #Poetry #Family #Truth #FamilyReunion 

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