Confessions of a Deadbeat Poet

To all my children I've abandoned all these tortuously separated years.
I say, please give me a second chance.
I am sorry for not being the kind of Mummy and poet I wish I could have been.
Every single one of you I've generalized and summarized and so sorely missed and mis-analyzed since
I bore you from school desked stapled syllabi and into my life's alibi:
6th grade: Rynd
7th grade: Steinbeck
8th grade: Bradbury
9th grade: Hemmingway
10th grade: Plato
11th grade: Plath and Vonnegut
and 12th grade well Mummy was too busy being Ms. Valedictorian A.P. World Lit on a 12-mile bus trip to another school district because my brilliance wasn't contained in the unmasterful curricular map of Allen Park High School Go Jags even though I just recently attended my first spoken word mic night in over 5 years and someone mentioned "parody" and I chuckled in the air like I was going to snap my deep literary fingers braised against themselves in beauty when really, I didn't know a damn thing being said or the poet who was being read (Poe) or which part of it I was supposed to tap the table on and when to nod my head ...instead I was just immune to the highly inaccessible irony that was being shared in head shaking eyebrow glancing tight-lipped commune between every poet writer lover reader in the room even though I diseased myself with false imitation just so I wasn't the one grossly literary-anemic sickle celled mutation just sitting there going "what's a parody again?"

And to you all, my children's loving foster parents, I know what I may look like. Yes, I may be the charming yet absent for their whole life mother slouched in the back at their wedding the drunk and uninvited she's-the-kids'-mom-a-total-crazie who wants back into their lives just for the big drinks and free company and even though she's clapping at all the wrong times and red faced from the wine just let her drink and let her dine and let her dance and let her cry. Not that I've ever gotten drunk, danced, cried, and eaten six meals between midnight and 4am when I closed my eyes and passed out between the curb and some fries. Never, never, never.

Did I tell you what a great dancer I am too? And yes I am a singer, but I'm more like the Rihanna of singing and Celine Dion of dancing but anyways, I'm sure, there's no reason to go off on a tangential detour. Either way, I read better than I dance and write better than I sing so you can understand why I have been MIA from this whole thing, this literary scene, I mean not inaction but in action so amazing it would blow your mind. I am a little bit jealous, by my own admission, since I don't know allusion from alliteration and you, you live inside of a literary jukebox where you sniff out like ravenously rampant wild boors hyperboles and imagery and aphorisms and circumlocution (thank you Wikipedia) and I'm just the stiffed-neck imposter standing here with two fistfuls of quarters pretending like I've meta-analyzed Emilie Zola to Jane Austen (thank you about.com writers) and now, here in front of your comprehensive jukebox selection, I'm finally ready with pantameterical precision to choose one of my innumeral lost children to take to McDonald's for a 45 minute happy meal excursion before I have to hit the road to taste the Midnight Ride footprints of Paul Revere in my bonnet and Revolutionary dress just before I push off in my raft, no engine, 3 oars and an Amazon box filled with the last 18 books published by The Harvard Press I don't discriminate if they are words on parchment I will suckle each syllable like lustrous (thank you spellcheck) aromatic goji berries (thank you gardeningchannel.com) and you may wonder this, which lucky child will I select from your jukebox to play with? Well, I just can't choose between Tan and Dostoevsky because I just read all of their works both of them, three times, last night wrapped in a canary terrycloth robe and wrote poetry with my right and with my left puffed three packs of smokes, not all at once of course that's ludicrous and mad even though I once smoked half of a cigarette feeling quite the sexy savoy before realizing I had lit the wrong end and yes, I understand, you punctuate Dickinson like a printer and punch out Tolstoy like paper for all these long long years while I've been away and I just want to say thanks, so much, for being so dedicated and so brave, taking the time to get to know my children, all of them whom I've shut the book on and never got to know and if anyone in here is adopted or has been through foster care and is upset with me and wants to go because I'm analogizing the abandonment cycle where you've been left on the streets of Korea and eating out of alley dumpsters and then found by the police with your brother who was malnourished while you were an 18 month old chubster and then 8 months of foster care later adopted by white parents in an all white Midwest suburb and then recycled your unaddressed internalized fear of abandonment in every important relationship you've ever entered and then had an epiphany at the age of 30 that you really do believe in God and desire Jesus as your center and that you have 47 pages in 8 point font of people you need to see and apologize no joke straight faced and to their eyes for being pretentious or fake or distant from their lives especially to your adoptive father and mother, who spent their entire life savings to adopt you and your biological brother your only lifeblood to your vanished self and provide you unconditional love and redeal you a better hand than the cards that you were dealt but you were pissed off that the drop-ceiling of their emotional and intellectual capability was just not adequate for your I don't know who I am insanity so you shamed them into never stepping a foot into your room or your track meets or any compartment of your cold and callous heart until you cried a month ago in a minivan and said you were so sorry and begged your beautifully innocent mother for forgiveness for missing out on the love she tried to give you while you pissed years out the window - please stand up. Does that describe anybody here? No?
Great, so glad I don't have to say I'm sorry to anyone because saying sorry is for total duds and weak kneed pigeons so anyways moving on, back to my lovely unread children.

You know, I'm already pretty tipsy not as much as I was at my parents 25th anniversary party that I planned and then drank seven giant vodka tonics at and danced with my dad's 4 foot 10 inch tall cowboy hat wearing retired coworker but that's neither here nor there, right, no I can't see the buttons and I should save these quarters because I always keep fistfuls to drop into the buckets of homeless men and women who I pass by and forget they have a name and a story and a life and then go home and beat my mental unhumanitarian feet so that they might feel the pain just for a moment of what it's like to stand freezing on the street for three winter years and beg for the change other people drop in jukeboxes then go the bathroom and stand in line like herded sheep, so they can fix their makeup and adjust their bra and pick a 14 dollar dinner and 30 bucks of beer out of their teeth, and then by the time they come out, Rihanna is over and Celine Dion's about to start.

Yeah so, on second thought, I will not be selecting any of my children to play with today I'm so sorry children, dead or alive, Mummy will be back and it won't take me 30 years this time - so I may look like I'm from some East Asian peninsula but it always bodes well for me to sound white and Britishly on the phone when I'm yelling at a Comcast representative to just connect me with their billing department because they've overcharged me for 6 months straight and have no idea how difficult it is to have a 2 year old clawing at your leg as that automated bloat sings her digitized refrain "I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response, please say your thirty-nine digit account code followed by the pound" and just as I'm about to finish verbally cracking the dizzying davinci code my 4 year old daughter yells "I don't like marbles!" I mean, not that I have two small children living at home because I have no home I only roam in Twain's swathy colloquially infested rivers and in the fragmented pastoral mysticism of Faulkner (thanks answers.com).

So, in the meantime, please take care of them for me, I promise that I will come back to look at them, perhaps borrow them just to stack them on my nightstand, adore them as decorations to make me look astute and well-read then in 6 months I'll return them, a coffee stain or pizza grease or a few snickers chocolate fingerprints but always, always,
I will regret just one small thing in my being MIA from this literary scene for so long - that there's just something not quite in me that you've got that you can wrap your comprehension around the words of these children, the authors of our history, and you can absorb them, breathe them, hold them and read them explain them without pretense, quietly, for the one tacit reason that you must because they aliven a golden strand of silk truth that connects to the belly of your soul and if they disappeared from your life, so would you so you don't sell them out of your garage or loan them without knowledge but with insistence that they go to nurturing untrembling hands not strange foreign lands where they will be left beneath scattergories and 13 inches of unopened mail and a diet coke can. So to you, I tell you this - my admiration of this scene and everyone here shines like a child's flashlight from afar as drunk as I may be sitting in the back in my broken glass jar, though I stopped drinking three months ago because I realized that alcohol for me is my sin bottled up and pointless and empty, so this sober light that I shine is as much upon the literary faces of those whose writing lives have lifted our universe upon the pin of their imaginations as it shines upon you, you who know that if you were not here, perhaps literature and the writing art just like children would disappear into thin air from our textbooks and conversations, microphones and constellations, and it's for the next generation that you will and must continue to raise them at the foothills here of cafes and writing groups, or your confessional reading chair you cry inside in the corner of your living room, or maybe it's your closet or your notebook or your skin but somewhere you take your soul and confess out loud what your burning lungs can't hold in. And since honesty is and has always been my motto, this is what I must confess: I am a deadbeat poet, an estranged writer, but with your help, and your support, maybe one day far far away, I'll pick up my pen and cast golden strands of silk words like the knotted velvet souls I don't understand or haven't read or bothered to appreciate or know and I'll humble myself as bleeding ink like a footnote upon the shadow of their shadows, and perhaps over many'a coffee stains and freezing winters and apologetic tears, I will pen enough inadequate love letters to pull me out of the regret of not listening to my heart but listening to my fears, for 30 dusty years I've ignored all the words that have now called me back to life, and maybe one day you will invite me over to your home to stay a while to sit inside your beautiful literary jukebox collection that wait in rows on the bookshelves of your affection, just so long as, just one time, you'll follow my golden strand, give me one momentary glance, then read the confessions of an adopted mother who was given a second chance.