Fred Longworth

What Sticks Out

When four beers are not enough,
the fifth. When he spies her from his barstool,
the breasts. When her boyfriend notices
him watching, the eyes. When he doesn’t
stop watching, the audacity. When the boyfriend
tells him to get lost, the fuck you.
When the fist strikes the face, the nose.
When he stumbles home and finds her
waiting up for him, the excuse.
When Narcissus flirts with his reflection,
punches out his own lights,
and crawls home to plead forgiveness
from himself, the drama of self-absorption.

UCSD Medical Center, Eleventh Floor

This is where you come when you don’t want
to die, when symptoms put their shoulders to your door,
and all the massive furniture you’ve shoved
against the frame begins to slip and topple.

This is where you come when fresh-pressed carrot juice
laced with kale, chard, beets, and parsley,
when garlic, astragalus, milk thistle, ginger,
unfermented sinensis, ginseng, and maitake,
when valerian and its bounty of sleep,
when meditation in a yard of broad trees
and silent fences, are no more anathema to tumors
than first-world guilt to third-world hunger.

This is where you come when it seems
the man you loved and lived with
has forsaken you in your hour of greatest travail.
This is where the man you’ve pushed away
these hard four months comes up to visit.

Letter to an Eighteen-Year-Old

I should thank you for the hundreds of times
we sat across the dinner table, and you
wouldn’t talk with me. Sullenness and Scorn
made genial companions – and taught me
plainly: how foolish is Love, how fatuous
my obsession with values.

Remember the advice about running your life
more from reason than feeling? I take it all
back. When you did something outrageous,
I shouldn’t have throttled back my anger,
shouldn’t have remonstrated or, at worst,
shouted. I should’ve cut loose, gone with
my feelings, beat the crap out of you.

You’re right – I don’t understand you.
After soul-searching, I know the reason why:
I was never your age. And if current trends
persist, you will never be mine.
I really ought to call you and apologize
for sticking around when other men would’ve
deserted you. A single parent is more than
enough for half a child.