Tipton Poetry Journal
Heart, broken Denise Thompson-Slaughter Tonight our son stands on the deck in the rain conversing with himself. Yes, he has a waterproof jacket on—I’ve checked— tho’ nothing on his stubborn head but a thick mat of untamed curls. This son, who, in ‘92 won the local pharmacy’s Most Beautiful Baby contest and a month of free diapers, now has messy whiskers and a pot belly and is unaware that his shirt is on backwards. This boy who loved broccoli and got recruited for a modeling gig at age five, (but was too squirmy to be invited back), this child who understood negative numbers and surface tension before first grade (we thought he was headed for science or engineering), then one day put his head down on the table, hands on either side, and wailed “My brain is going too fast!”— this boy by twelfth grade could barely pass basic math or English classes. My kind, strong, big-bellied, bewhiskered, junk-food-craving, sloppy man-child is standing in the rain lost in fantasies of the Blitzkrieg and Buddha, the Dalai Lama and dragons, Roman centurions and Rastafarians — his torrent of words never runs dry. And the deluge smashes against the dam of my heart. But I’ve learned not to go there, not to linger at the bottomless whirlpool of What could I have done differently/ why didn’t we face it and get earlier intervention/ would anything have made a difference/ why wasn’t I more patient/ what oh what would it be like to have a normal family [Normal’s just a setting on the dryer!”] and the eternal universal self-pitying “Why me?” [Why not?] We cannot cry because if we do we’ll never stop.
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