© 2008 mykl g. sivak

Isaac

Blue-collared lithium sniffer,
buck knife wearer,
dropout rehabber,
fifteen,
only child.

The other sides:
comrade, the enabled,
destroyer- corrupter,
magician, corrupted-

fucked at thirteen,
smoking since seven.

Together we’d burned
shoplifted satanic bibles
that would not burn
because of their dark magicks

in the woods between the highway
and suburbia, atop the fort

we had made with our own hands
and borrowed fathers’ tools
out of plywood and wood joists
we’d stolen

in the summer night
from the site of the newly built home
my own parents would soon buy.

His father was not his birth father,
my parents- unaware
their rearing had ceased-
as they slept we wandered,

smoked whole packs of his grandmother’s
cigarettes in unfinished abandoned
houses, dirt ditches
in the night

cool soft earth against thighs
through worn denim. And really
we were our own fathers then.

Everything we had was stolen,
and in our heads we prayed
some types of invented
atheistic prayers
to clear that mark
from bookstore runes before
we cast them to see
if we would make it to twenty or die,
because we were not good really
at raising ourselves.

But we did not die,
due to the strange magic
his antichristian cosmic
protector or punisher

swaddled him within,
wrapped around his
spoiled baby’s-body,

that doomed him to continue on,
to stumble safe
from every collision,

each time
his heart would stop
it did not stay stopped.

In wintertime late nighttime
we stood on the thick frozen
retention basin and stared
at the stars

because there was nothing else
for us to do anymore,
near feral and fatherless-

because my parents were
wounded,

because his birth father
had stumbled,

taken a small pillow
and pressed it down to cover
his baby’s-mouth and nose.