ELDER GIDEON #1

how mom’d rant at the evening news more menacing

than Gorbachev’s mark of the beast or looming mushroom skull fire

were the hordes of bare-chested men breaching TV screens demanding rights

to be perverse! she’d spit wasn’t judgment clear? Queen!

she never meant to target shoot

my opaque silhouette

blocking TV features

of fallen stars

Rock Hudson inhaling his own ashes

I bystood dazed in the early eighties

a boy disembodied by his own desires

a basement swollen shut

its only window

vented bullet holes