um…confessional/the other one

Five years ago
Henry awoke three hours
Before his death.
He was supposed to have been
a good man, or he thought,
But a disagreement between
him and his wife
on THAT point
proved to be
his undoing.

Henry was a bastard
and he got what he
deserved. I’m sorry
that it hurt–he didn’t
deserve THAT. But
Henry didn’t last long
after he knew he
was to die. And really,
The shock of it was
the worst part. For
someone like Henry
The fetal position
is one he’s only seen
in his wife–
never one he actively
Tried himself.

–

My mother was the strongest
Personality I knew. Sometimes
She said people were bastards
because they weren’t “getting any.”
Henry wasn’t, but not because
I didn’t try. He didn’t love
Sleeping with me. Maybe a roll
in the Hay would have done him
wonders–made him forget his
cold and pinched demeanor, made
him groan and spasm and flop
like the rest of us do when we
do it alone.

I’ll confess that I’m not sure.
But after awhile, you stop asking
questions, and the rote in your life
is the mode of your life, tireless
and final. You expect only that
the next few moments are the moments
you have just endured, spread out
over a timeline of a forward-moving
marker saying “You Are Here.”

–

I don’t know that the second poem differs that much from the second stanza of the first, BUT I thought it was interesting to include a first-person shift in perspective, and I thought a bit of a confessional within the narrative was…fitting. I like that the first is a little skinny, and the first STANZA of the first is a little glib. It snakes downward, speaking in a language that is familiar and pulpy.

The second poem is more squat. I had a hard time with the form of the “confessional,” because I wanted to include the words “I confess…” or something to that effect. Or for some reason I wanted to delve into melodrama, thinking this was some piece of 1930s thriller trash. Wikipedia calls a confessional a sightline into a poet’s heart (or it means to) and it’s difficult to write in that form when the subject matter is not of SELF but of someone else. It’s supposed to be deeply personal.

And maybe I did it wrong, but I thought “what would I confess if I were her?” and I thought…”what is private?” And sex came to mind, and that (the “not getting any”) IS something my mother would say… of teachers I didn’t like, or rude people she met in grocery stores. So I put it in there, and that’s what began the poem. I don’t know. These are usually the things that spark my stories/poems. These little bits of a character’s personalities and then everything else is a segue.