THE LAST THING I TAUGHT THE DEAD KID
He appears
as a ghost
in the blue suit I wore
my first Communion.
Always his desperate need
to be bad.
He shimmers
not fades. "I'm hungry."
he says, "I'm you
but I'm dead.
Tell another story
about me."
And then
the little dance,
head down,
shoulders swaying,
spinning a slow wheel
into my past.
He's moving now
and I'll be up
all night. He's got
the stolen matchbook,
and the wad of cash
my mother was saving
for the family bus-trip
to my sister's wedding--
we all end up
in separate cars.
He wants to know
if it'll burn and when.
He's off and kicking
the dim boy
down the block,
calling him "dickhead."
He's six and makes
the boy eat dirt.
Now he's looking
for a rock:
to bust a car window
on the interstate below,
just to hear
something bigger shatter;
to split the skull
of the swan,
tie the duffel bag shut
on the kittens
and sink it like Atlantis
into the creek;
to whistle
at the crying girl:
no, he doesn't know,
hasn't seen
whatever
she's looking for.
And it does no good
to tell him to keep
his hands in his pockets,
sit-down, behave.
He's not going to keep it
to himself.
He'll dance
like a broken marionette
until I pick up the pen,
and take him out
into the traffic
for tender introductions.
It never matters.
The last thing I say
is the next little dance
I can't leave behind.
I have to kill him
all over again.
WHY I'M NOT A PYROMANIAC ANYMORE
A twelve-year-old boy is burning
a small pool of nail polish remover
on top of his sister's four-drawer dresser
in her bedroom where he should not be.
He lights the fire with a match-book taken
like a tooth from the mouth
of his mother's purse, which he found
by going into her bedroom,
where he also should not have been.
His vision caught on the burning pool,
he doesn't see the ribbon of liquid
spill over the lip of the dresser's top
and into the open panty-and-bra drawer-
igniting the fuse of a panty-hose leg,
the slow sizzle of a purple silk camisole.
The boy, unaware, thinks he hears
someone coming, snatches-up the matches
and scurries behind the closed door.
Minutes pass, before his nose perks
like coffee down the wrong throat,
and his eyes slowly pan across the room,
from the bed, to the night stand,
to the dresser in the corner-black smoke
billowing from its open top drawer.
The boy hears the commotion downstairs,
acrid smoke now filling the house,
and knows that the bathroom sink
is too far away for a one man bucket brigade,
knows that the flames are raging too high
to be smothered by closing the drawer.
The boy knows too, that this is the last time,
and the first time of many, he will burn,
when they open the door to find him
and his sister's underwear drawer in flames,
pants down around his ankles,
putting out the fire the only way he could.