Aaron - Shakespeare's Monkeys

Aaron

draft 1

The withered hermit and his cracked shack
decorated the mountain on the north shore
of Merrymeeting Lake

like a Christmas bobble that promises
Presence all year
and never comes down.

God, I was a just a stupid kid with bottle rockets
and big dreams in '83
when I worshiped false gods
and trespassed against him
in his cluttered bedroom.

Course, I never met him
but I imagined his face like some
holy scripture of the Abenaki
and a fat 12-gauge in his hand.

It was a glorious joyful fear
every firecracker I shot danced for him,
and when the smoke stood
for a full second at the tip of my tongue
that was my new alter

Years after my grandfather had died,
I saw the bastards life in print, "Aww, Papa, you never told me
he was just another white boy
who sniffed some bobcat urine
and lost his Christian soul
to those red-skinned devils."

The obituary was like some Dr. Seuss-Gone-Wrong
tale of higher education, drugs, and
peace.

I didn't go to the funeral
but I did drive two hours, to sit by the warm ramshackleof his once-home

I stared out over our promised land
and sang another hymn to that golden calf
I built with him in the destitute moments of my best ignorance.

All that meaning, brittle and broken,
in the tatters of an orange sleeping bag
rumpled amongst empties and piss-fulls
were a a couple of orange Flintstone's tablets
like the remains of 10 commandments
un-chewed by man or God.

"Hell kid," papa said,
"He ain't nothing more than us
just drunker and lost-er."