From Nobody Loves Me

John Stoss

From Nobody Loves Me

Ed note: Poet, novelist, painter, playwrighte, singer-songwriter and general genial genius John Stoss has just published a volume of collected poems—500 pages beginning with older work (most of it gathered in a 1977 Lost Roads volume called Finding the Broom) and including a 200 page narrative autobiographical poem. We are privileged to present a few brief excerpts from early in the poem. Stoss was born and raised on a Kansas farm, and that is the landscape for these excerpts from the poem, which, like the book itself, bears the title Nobody Loves Me.

Nobody loves me that’s what I’ve learned in all these years since I was born It’s not that I feel sorry for myself it’s just that I moved to California 25 years ago It was a great mistake I should have been leaving it when I arrived

Everything bad about California you’ve heard is true everything good you’ve heard is true I never adjusted all my life I thought eventually whatever was needed to help me find my way would happen that’s what they always

say as I wandered around first Kansas then Arkansas then Louisiana

then California throw in for a few months New York Minnesota where else for a few weeks days Mexico 3 times Kansas City a few weeks Phoenix

Nobody loves me when I’m born my mother admits years later when she keeps having these moments of truth as she dies on her feet you weren’t supposed to come along 2 children was all we wanted and so I wasn’t wanted

Couldn’t have an abortion or the Pope would drop the drumstick he’s about to put in his mouth my mother explains as the last moments of truth overwhelm her by the time I got married at 16 I was already tired of raising

children, neighbor’s children, uncle and aunt’s children all I did was shuffle back and forth so much for parental love through the guidance of God so she married a man 7 years older than her a fanatic at work

I’ll rest when I’m dead she said I am always amazed my mother’s

reality, all my life I listened to my mother every story she ever knew she tells me my sister before me when did my father stop listening maybe when she refused

to have sex with him anymore when he sat in his rocker watching TV smoking his corncob pipe packed with Prince Albert tobacco and the day rocking in his drunken brain successful in forgetting what he needed to forget

Everything I tell you that’s wrong my mother tells me and I tell you the truth eludes me too I read Bill Lavender’s book Memory Wing and see what I hide from myself but there’s more still waiting for discovery please help me

what a nice child I was always running wildly about and singing always told to shut up why what was wrong with my singing didn’t I have a good voice we weren’t white trash peasants maybe my father was he couldn’t even add

subtract divide multiply correctly when the taxes were done my mother

did them with him what did he do with his life when he didn’t have a pitchfork in his arms and stretched his muscles with all his strength I know when winter

left him sitting on the ladder in the sun by the shed the heaps of snow trying to melt he talked to himself about the wrongs done to him by his brother’s wives If I caught him he went silent until I was gone he hardly ever

played with me he was lost in his own world born the same year he died 67 years old he never learned a thing how did he expect me to grow up go to college get a job raise children like myself I should be a calf

or a mule a chicken, a goose, a pig and then he’d really love me he loves his livestock so proud can’t even kill them when my brother goes to the army he hands me the rifle I hate it worse than he does my brother

loves to kill things he loves to climb a tree among the other

trees down by the pond and shoot all the bird who appear the dogs eat them barking in approval my mother makes a weak remonstration why doesn’t she take

that gun away from him doesn’t he know when you kill an animal that’s the end of it the billions and billions of years that come before it lives and the billions of years after it it’s consciousness is nonexistent nothingness

oh I’m a wild kid but I find myself becoming an inhibited adult like I am now that’s how it happens everyone shakes their heads in shame I’m out of control when am I going to become an automaton the slave to endless days of work like everyone else

Be like my brother learn from his uncle how to be a mechanic become one of those people who climbs underneath a machine the oil crud falling into your eyes your fingers gripping wrenches your knuckles hitting

the sharp edges of steel and

blood running down your fingers and arm you cursing years before your age on the curse of finding what you were meant to do turn the steering wheel he yells to me goddamn it not that way

Sunday was a day off except the cows had to be milked at the same time every day no matter what rising from our beds me upstairs in the old rock house my brother and me sleeping in the same bed and my sister in the same room by the lone window outside of which was a big sticker tree in her own bed the roof of a deep V shape like a wild goose through which in the fall we could hear them flying over making such a beautiful sound you thought it was a musical instrument sometimes a tiny dog sleeping between me and my brother he always let the little dog lick him on the lips the pup was a child of our dog Tipper who secretly took care of us I never got enough sleep something almost always got in the way of the eight or nine or ten hours I needed mostly it was imagination that overworked and sleep seemed

like a few moments before someone threatened me if I didn’t get up cows had to be milked at the same time or it would cause them to give less milk as soon as my brother could see over the steering wheel he was driving us to church he was in a hurry to grow up it seems like my father wore an old blue suit all his life we were dressed up like third generation Czech farmers my mother desperate that we looked acceptable she herself said proudly she had so much work getting her children ready for church she didn’t have time to doll up I don’t know if she was ever aware she was not a very beautiful woman fat from the first day she was born

we parked a brand new 1940 Dodge in the ditch U-shaped so many cars already there in front around the side of the church how many times I’ve painted it on canvas everyone driving fairly new cars the advent of new prosperity

my brother is married and living in the rock house with his wife when he’s drafted

because of the Korean War the wretched ankle that got caught in the silage grinder and ended his football career won’t keep him out of the army he becomes a radio operator and because of his disability only serves half-time basic training but in our last dinner together as we’re eating my father’s love for Jimmy suddenly overcomes my father the fear of the war that brings on death he begins weeping with a ferocity that he’d reserved for his mother and brother John we’re at the kitchen table of the still new house and I remember when he wept for someone I can’t remember who and I stayed up half the nite mistaking the tied up dogs whining for my father weeping the worst or best part is when he goes off to Ft. Riley I do all the work he did and I really don’t like it when my father hands me the rifle and points on the head of the steer where I’m to shoot it he won’t do it he never does my brother who loves to kill is more than willing I should refuse but you have to do what your father tells you to do or else life has no meaning how can your father and mother be wrong and a life is snuffed out so we can eat I will go on to shoot a dog for no reason when I’m confused and uncertain in life the beautiful brownie for whom to this day I am moved to tears

because I can’t bear what I did I can never forgive myself nuns and priests lined up in my dreams telling me that the bible says man is the master over all the other animals without admitting we’re animals too well I can’t write about this anymore I want to talk about the visit to my brother I am a murderer I am a murderer who came back in a car from Junction City with his father driving it is raining fairly hard from a hurricane that came up through Texas and if you know how desperate in Kansas we get for rain how we live our lives in drought how the farmers do their work in a heat that makes a crop that should be a bright green a litter brighter everyday only the holiest don’t curse god and we seem to drive all nite and wake up to a world of little rivers all over the land I want to follow the running water from our pond I once saw a big fish I thought but i was gone but I keep looking the dogs bark and urge me on they run after a jackrabbit the only time they catch one is when the big black dog comes back with one that was already wounded Spooky was his name I can’t play I have to go check where the fences are most likely to be taken away by raging streams of nonexistent mountains