The Blackboard of His Eyelid

It has proved [to be] a difficult day and week, and it is only Tuesday. So, okay, the last thing you want from me right now is poetry. But damn, if I cannot help myself. Poetry provides for me a respite from the quotidian, and when the poem is as good as the one below...

It seems like forever ago, but it has been only hours that I wrote about metaphors and closing the loop. Only poets and husbands (well, the dastardly type at least) get away with not closing the loops. This poem includes metaphors aplenty and closes nary a one; doing so is left to you and your imagination...

David

From FUGUE

The Blackboard of His Eyelid
by Michael Bassett

If he had Becky Wilson here,
he'd make her confess that she had lied
about how his parents make him drink
from the toilet and sleep
in a rabbit cage. A pale and skinny
clump of literature, always out past
the curfew of acceptance, behind
enemy lines of imagination, he plays
torturer of the inquisition,
brandishing the garden shears.

On the playground, while he practices
impossible contortions
of introspection, they bloody his nose,
hating the secrets hidden
in the scriptorium of his oddness.
They crack his sharp ribs, desperate
for the futures he reads
on the blackboard of his eyelid.
They shake from his green satchel
two dung beetles, most of a Mabel
Garden Spider, a scab from his skinned
knee, a sliver of bailing wire,
a cat's eye marble, and a quart
of Quick Start lighter fluid.

He's a Chihuahua-eyed chicken boy
with hundreds of freckles
his mother swears are seeds
from the pumpkin they carved
him out of. But he knows where
babies come from. He knows the darkness
of the closet, where he listens
to his mother's crying. He learns, under
the henhouse, the weasel's way.

He can't stop thinking about apricots
shriveling, paint belching, tiny frogs
dripping above matches. Outside
his secret fort, yellowing
sycamore leaves crackle.