The Open Road to the Young Ones, 2018

He was never openly falling down drunk - he just couldn’t come home - to be with
himself - he couldn’t keep his hands off somebody else - he just couldn’t seem to stop
killing souls with a vengence - revengence. His own son - the breath stopping beauty of
his own son - he seemed to need to wipe it away - the purity of it - the sanity - I saw it -
and now that son is back after wandering across the country - he rejects maleness - he
rejects femaleness - how else could he be - each one he saw pitted against each other
leaving him out - abandoned by their war - so of course he had to wear medallions
around his neck - like the natives who lost the land - leather tongs - bear claws - brass
bracelets that turned his wrists green like the trees - like the rails he rode with the other
homeless 21 year olds - he did have to leave at all cost - he had to leave to save his life
- it was really quite simple - the man wanted to kill him - called it love - was driven - the
murderous kind - the kind that sent me away to fight for my life - understand it - it could
have been my father - his father - the kind that invades ones soul and body as if it
were food and just keeps plunging - on killing living things - just living out - over and
over - desecration - as if welcoming the grave - my father took pictures of the graves of
the relatives and presented them at family reunions - other relatives put out real pictures
of real people - it’s all over now - he's dead - but his father is not - and his father has
eyes that look like caves - ravenous and filled with static - for his son - that he cannot
change, create or control and the son has come back one more time to look into his
face just to remember why he has to wander - he will be a prophet type - he will have to
cross over Jordon - he will go to Reno with the other homeless children and rescue
himself - he will have to say - with his golden hair falling down - curly - golden - girl like
- his shoes too big and socks - stripes and differenent colors - his shorts over tights and
his drawings of skulls and hermaphrodite beings loving each other with no symbols or
identifications - he will have to say to his father - I must leave you now for an indefinite
amount of time until I can think straight and fall down before you and accept the
unbearable agony of your suffering and your blindness and your unwillingness to grow
up and let me go. I am not your little boy - I am not your little toy. His stunning beauty -
graceful - embracing the Yucatan, Africa, the Tuetons, Chief Joseph and Tibet - the
paragon of every culture that went into his making - the culture of American Brooklyn.
He is wandering now - across Trumps America and I wish him well and understand that
he cannot fit into family and has picked up the banjo and sings with the sorrow of every
folk singer that has ever sung about the history of the world. Perhaps he is walking
away from the falling down drunkenness of the world and will do it better but must first
get away and while the brimstone is falling the day is unspeakably beautiful and so is
he.