Night Falls, Now Listen
*
I love this goddamn world. It is a fucking catastrophe. I wish sometimes that I'd be spared, but I won't be. Neither will you. We're both for the boneyard.
Let's not squawk about it, okay?
Let's have a little dignity.
***
I have found that I love to cook. I love it in the same way that I love to fight or shoot. It is like car chases and doing art and writing a good poem and hitting someone with a solid right cross.
Only it tastes better.
***
Test of a man:
Chop down trees and build a log cabin.
Build a boat and catch fish and cook them in a cast iron skillet with onions and fennel.
Get the best woman there is and make her love you. Don't give her a choice.
Go into the woods and find the monster living there and fight him and either break him or kill him, his choice. Cook him and eat him or throw his rotten body into the sea or burn it up or become best friends.
Write a good book and read all of the good ones you can get your hands on.
Save a damsel in distress.
Get a tattoo from a disreputable character, drunk or sober.
Fight a lion, a tiger, and a snake. Win or lose, it don't matter.
Bury someone for a friend.
Do what's required, damn the cost.
Love with abandon, harder than you ever hit anyone.
Weep.
Lash out in fury. Make the earth quake in fear of you.
Look death in the eye and watch him blink.
Put your daughter on your shoulders as you walk through the crowds at the fair. Give her the giant pink bear you won at the bottle toss booth.
Change the tire.
Take out the garbage.
Fix the roof.
Kill the chicken.
Put out the fire.
Get the cows in.
Batten down the hatches.
Do what they're afraid you'll do after all.
***
When it's time to go, go down swinging.
*
posted by tearful dishwasher at 8:19 PM
3 Comments:
I love list poems in particular list poems that teach without preaching and celebrate all the way through.
The world is a safer place even if it's just in my head, because you are in it. Knowing you are in it that you are real and honest and strong and messed up and good and because you love to cook and yes it's an art.
You reminded me about how once me and my brother caught 2 giant catfish and we were 8 and 9 years old and we put them in the cast iron pan with hot oil and those cat fish started jumping around in the pan like they had come to life and I hit them with a hammer.
You reminded me that I haven't seen my brother in 27 years and I miss him so goddamned much it's a hole in my heart and he only lives a few miles away. He's in bad shape worse much worse than me.
And today I feel richer with knowing you are there and with remembering.
love,
REbecca
Rebecca-
Thank you.
I am indebted to you in a way I cannot possibly repay.
But I'm good with that!
yrs-
tearful
Win or lose it doesn't matter.
Jesus, this test of man is so true and bloody heroic and mundane and so full of fight and love and service.
You have a huge heart, I can feel it beating from here.
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