- Shrivel, Ravel and Roll
- by Erik Rader
How could I be so
meticulous
Culpable as a pusher
Professional as an adjuster
Scholarly as an old maid
Like a smashed and desiccated varmint
Hung on a plastic Christmas tree
At the exact center
Of a crater
I forwent the bacchanalian revels
And slept in a military bed
In the Newport YMCA
I stood behind the podium
And, though naked,
Sported the desecrated cassock
Of my father, or someone,
In putting on the mantle of manhood
As I had worshipped it in my father
I bored myself to death, was buried
In the woods in a trash bag,
Was never found,
How could I rape myself this way,
The shame like a grenade exploding
Inside of a chest, mine, or someone's
Inside everyone there is a crime
Waiting to be committed, and
Stuck to its heel, the failure
To commit it
Rising like a cobra's hood
Like a midnight black fury of confusion
What? What? What? Am I blind now? What?
It strikes behind the eyes and it strikes
And it strikes behind the eyes and it
Strikes again
How dare you rise or even aspire to rise
Above the wall-papering shadow
Of the man who held the Word of God in his hand
And took the measure of your soul?
The man who survived the Great Depression
But not his own?
And mom's books around my shoulders
Like flightless wings, those of a dodo perhaps or penguin,
Her Chretien a Troyes, her Chaucer, her Spenser,
Her Wolfram von Eschenbach, her Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Her Shakespeare, annotated with notes from the folios,
Her OED, with magnifying fucking glass, her Beowulf,
Her Metamorphoses, her Iliad, her Odyssey,
Her fucking office with the sex ed pamphlet for teens
Hoping I would read about what they would not tell me,
I wanted to speak with the voice of authority
Like Homer crouched blind in the wood shavings
Of the warcraft he could never pilot,
Instead of fire and brimstone I was raised
On Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
Joseph Campbell, CS Lewis, for chrissake,
JRR fucking Tolkien,
And instead of a Magus holding aloft
His luminescent crosier, I find myself
More like Richard Pryor, funnyman turned
Flaming freebaser with Parkinson's who
Once was funny, I find myself a two-bit
Walter Mitty, who punches tickets at the theater
And dreams of dallying with the exotic dancers
The boy with glasses who can never be
A fighter pilot
There's people starving in Africa, yes,
But I'm starving in America
No fuel left for this fire but these books
I must burn the books written
By other men
I must burn the Bible
In my father's hand
I must burn my mother's
Unfinished Ph.D. thesis
I must burn the pages of my dream diary
I must burn the scrolls I buried as a child
In glass bottles sending messages to the devil
I must burn the blankets of my childhood
I must burn the cinema of my fantasies
I must watch the skin of every spirit animal
I followed into the woods
shrivel ravel and roll
__________
Erik Rader lives in Seattle with his wife and two dogs. He is the lead singer
and principal songwriter for the rock band Blind Watchmakers.
