family

Fly Fly Brooklyn Birdie

Thundering upstairs neighbor
Where are you going?
Walking back and forth
From midnight to morning.

Your footsteps betray
A sense of unease
A life’s work undone
Malignant ambition.

Is it a family dynamic
That’s left you pacing the miles?
Your mother perhaps who lives downstairs.
A man burdened as someone’s child.

Someday you’ll fly lighter than air
Not even stomp up the stairs
To the third floor, one farther away
Then glide off the rooftop and soar.

Or perhaps your mother may drag you
Flapping and squawking
Up to the top of the nest
And fling you out over the streets of Brooklyn.
If she knows what’s best.

The Tarzan and the Bunny

Tarzan and Bunny.
Two sides of the same coin.
My coin.
My grandfathers.

Tarzan was a wild man.
Bunny was a mild one.

In pictures I’ve seen,
The dash and style of the grand one,
The intense eyes of the shy one.

Tarzan got his name from his children—a fearful yet affectionate term, earned by holding the attention of six daughters, with volume, and primal paternal gestures.

Bunny is not so funny. ‘Twas a childhood polio name, perhaps the cause of much hopping shame. The name remained intact, with his wife’s perpetuation biting to the bitter end.

Tarzan lived large, and wider than beasts from the constrained and neatly maintained forests of convention.

Bunny died a rich man in a moth-eaten cardigan, with a million dollars in an iron box in a freezer in the basement covered by fifteen year old meat.

It seems that my coin has fallen most often on the Bunny head side. But Tarzan always lurks below, on the flip side, waiting to swing down the stairs and cry out in a burning jungle madness.