 |  |  | |
| hugh fox |  | 1. ABORTED ME Brotherless and sisterless, just me, you know, back in the thirties, just like now, both of um had to work their asses off, no one ever in the apartment but me and them, and if they’d done it to me too, imagine all the undrunk rootbeers and glasses or Irish Creme Liquor, all the women who never would have had me driving my pleasure-spear into them, all the readers who never would have read one of my lines, or the six kids that never would have been, pass the bacon, pork sausage, let’s try a year or two in Caracas or Madrid, Buenos Aires, the Amazon, and no two generations down to the next sweet eyes and master-talkers and sweet ties to realities that escaped from getting tossed in the operating room trash. 2. TWO CHICAGOS So my M.D. father would always get summer jobs for me through his patients, like digging ditches for water-pipes on new streets, Sicilianos and regular Italianos who had to talk English to talk to each other, always bringing me a little home-made wine, or the summer I was a butcher for the Santa Fe railroad, Mr. Meat Cutter- Upper, or delivering financial reports in downtown Chicago, working as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, my uncle Jim Vincent a beef-carcass deliverer for Armour, my uncle Jake down at the First National Bank, my Jewish-Czech grandmother always baby-sitting for fifty cents an hour, other aunts and uncles teaching high school, always Mass and Communion every day, Trinitarian Holy Maria heaven waiting Up There for us, driving up to Oak Park and looking at mansions, then back to our South Side apartment, always talking about mansions, never making it out of an apartment, at home with the mafioso guys I went to grammer school with, poured into education like crazy, but never (even at seventy-seven) feeling alienated from the Down There class, as part of Them as part of Provost Walter Adams or Dr. Maria Costa-Fox (my wife)....down to Brazil with her to visit her family, Favela and Snob Hill the same, multiple souls in one Irish-Spanish-Brazilian- Czech-German Jewish-Catholic body. 3. CHELSEAING Chelseaing back into the 1860’s old brick sky-reachings-for Zou Zou Toute Française, one of Grandma Roos’ Reubens, like coming back to heimat Israel, thrown out of Bosnia, Slovakia, La Boheme by the still-letting-us- pre-Belsen SURVIVE, tree house ample moms and slide-climb hot chocolate kids, let’s tree a little ourselves, all the face-the-sun/moon credence that went into this almost cell-phoneless, earringed, poney-tailed, kid-glasses, pink pants, fake (plastic) bamboo jungle tree-house in the middle of freezing rain Chlesean NOW. 4. DOZING OFF Dozing-off after the hot chocolate, Dream One, firing square in the dark, I can’t see the faces of the fire-ers, then hanging in the rec room from one of the beams, wearing my antique grey tweed Outer Hebrides suit-coat and cap, that fall as my neck snaps, then in the control room on this cargo-ship off the Somalian coast, pirates in a dinghy starting to shoot, I rev up the engine, turn it into a speed boat, then eating arse nic mangos in the Amazon, down I go, off the sofa in the indoor tree house in Chelsea, Beatrice (2) trying to swing on the plastic rings hanging from the purple bars,not quite making it as the little boy next to me, playing with a toy railroad car and wooden tracks, says “I’m Henry,” points to a little blonde girl on a swing, “That’s Yvette...we’re from Montreal.” 5. FURTHER Further and further away from cardiac stress-tests into Boursin chicken on the river away into pre- everything but Savior-eggs and Virgin trees that gull it into infinity. 6. I AM “I am the younger brother of Jesus-Moses, born on Sinai at the break of winter dusk, and I have come back to reborn the world!” “Not reborn, re-create” I created language: BORN YLD NASCER PHUL-KARI, and.....” “First step, total anihilation, step two Adam II from the mouth of Zootropic I Walking Stick that eats brainless, feel-less, painless LEAVES.” | |
| | | |