What the Muses Leave Behind

My name is Paul Prince , and my mother is an addict.                               I cradled her Addictions              and a trafficked woman   from Ukraine my grandmother took her in                       our home     the sanctuary  shelter  haven of lost causes                                            Trafficked woman and I married       had three kids              and loads of piss and vinegar bickering        I’m an all-day sucker My wife is a liar      her words bloom like barbs under my skin                                                                     we share a welted shirt                                                                          family heirloom I think                         she thinks        she uses for fun            Coney Island without the crowd I think                                  there are devils    who camp in her heart                     who                                               fol

I go to my cushion, I sit with Iran Iraq, all shook up - 7.3, an inconvenient sanction, with catastrophe to break its back. I sit with red scarfed women, quiet as the dead - with their broken city, broken body, broken song. I sit with the ones who always will remember, forgiving my amnesia, preserving us like a peat bog, tar pit. I sit with my faucets of hot water and long showers, my own safe place, a lifetime of golden yolk, delicious. Under the same sky, I sit with ten thousand children toting five-gallon buckets, minding minefields and mortars. I sit with questions poking the soft soles of my feet. when I walk too fast they pop open and swallow me. I sit with dilemma, with a thready song, pretending that my fingers can touch the grief of red scarfed women. I sit in webs of hope, take notice of a pileated messenger, hammering away for the little things that deliver us. And when grace tips me on my head, I am an ocean-dreaming pud