Some Shit About Professional Wrestling

If I wasn't a poet, I think
I'd be a professional wrestler.
Trading in pens and pencils for
baby oil and hammerlocks.
Putting poetry in motion before
half-empty bingo halls.
Passion before self-preservation.
Some grow out of it,
some grow into their tights.

Becoming masked men, generic luchadors,
heroes, villains, moral in-betweeners.
At the make or break mercy of sleazy,
leisure suit wearing, comb over having,
cigar-smoking promoters glad-handing
and short-changing the card's who's who
before they take stage to portray the
night's brutish pageantry.
An inarticulate violence,
pre-determined and practiced.

Spilled blood, false finishes,
technical excellence.
The rush when people react
to these theatrics!
Subverting the expectations of
an attentive audience.
Masturbating their emotions,
making them believe what you feel is real.

Then someday when I'm broken
and old, long after my last look
up at the lights, glory days in
the rear-view traveling down that
sudden road to irrelevance,
I'll wonder...
How will I be remembered?
Will I be remembered at all?

If I wasn't a poet I'd be a
professional wrestler.
Though I'd forego questions
about legacy to chase the insatiable-
satisfaction...the one win I can't pin down.

The Bad Genes

I often wonder why you can't
bear to hear Cat's in the Cradle.
Is it in the way you relate?
You know, little boy blue,
the man on the moon?
When ya comin dad I -
Forget it.

I remember sounds of snapping
branches, the way an apple falls.
I remember the first bite of
bitter fruit, the taste of hate
searing my tongue, blistering my
lips, lighting a fire in my belly
that still burns. I'd rip you out
if you weren't so rooted.

I remember September 28th.
His birthday was the next day.
I remember feeling alone on mine.
I remember thinking strength was
not letting mom see me cry.
I remember wishing myself away
as we stood in silence, silence
that's since become so familiar.

I remember the last time you left.
Fractured frames littered the floor
of a half-empty home.
I remember blood blotting out the
faces of a father and son, my last
photographs of fatherhood
buried under broken glass.

Now I remember why you're
not welcome in my world.
13 years you've been asbsent
from these pages, strange parallels.
I suppose I should thank you for
reminding me why I write.
Though it took another look
at which way the apple rolls,
I now know,
you don't belong in my poems.