Old Poem 2

Late 2022

Do you walk into a restaurant and smell, 

dull repenting dead resuscitated eyes,

ever, a water tank painted, 

in grease and dust,

ever, a dried noodle stuck,

between the royal red booth cushions,

drunk bald fathers fighting (for) the bill.

_

So you ask, the owner of these eyes,

are you sorry? They answer, no, no,

no, we saw the trauma in these

dark brown eyes, not ours

but for them it’s the hours spent

at the altar, sacrificing a childhood

or two, is nothing to these bleary-eyed

_

Terrors, of the night served on Daddy’s whitehat platter,

in the day, you hear a harried

string plucked in the back, 

and you know little Me

is being turned into music

by backroom devils, separated 

from the sound of Mommy’s sizzling kitchen chicken.

_

And it’s not a wonderful sound to hear, the too-salty tears of

Mine flowing freely in the walk-in refrigerator, seasoning

the reeking tofu with generational

misfortune, and an instrument of

surrender.

_

Do you ever look past the restaurant and

hear the violin of the little boy in the back?

I didn’t, and that was my mistake.