Two Burns

Smelling of moth balls
beneath his plaid swim trunks,
(the ones so stretched his testicles
dangled out the leg holes),
Dad hid the forbidden album
in the bottom drawer
of the thin legged chest,
ready to topple hard
on the hollow wood floor.
Awkward in the room
of my conception,
I looked any way.
Toxic glue-backed triangles
licked, stuck, and held
each photo to fibrous paper.

In his unscholarly scrawl,
“A night I will remember,”
was a hellish photo from Okinawa,
the Jap tracers streaking the night
and bombs bursting the landing strip
while Dad hunkered beneath his bulldozer
down behind the blade, cold sweating
Betties and Zeroes in tropical heat
drawing his testicles up in a cavity
and they wouldn’t drop for two days.

“The morning after,” a dead Jap
denied all dignity in death,
flung to the broken earth
with pants at his busted ankles,
muddy cheeks humped high
with his tiny scrotum dangling
as ineffective as the busted rifle.

Having seen these,
I had no taste for John Wayne
or any kind of castrated lies.


Some Salve

Caught in peeling gloss glory,
our split-level perched on the hill,
gold shingled and olive shuttered
glistening ice sickle gutters
in faded tribute to 70’s ordinary.

On the shoveled walkway
that old yellow-snow artist,
Pugsley, forever surveys his canvas
from his mashed coal mask
his pink organ poked out one side,
the very tongue that lapped
the Rheingold I poured
in his water dish,
his tags clicking tin,
staggering to the den,
sneezing, a licking foam grin
begging more brew.

One starling in the barren oak,
glazed and ice blue snow blind
my window, above the garage
regarding the plow packed street
in demolition derby season
on our broken duct-taped sleds
blading Klein’s bony shins.

Fit for a Corinthian king,
The Cordoba, our copper chariot
in K-mart vinyl elegance
with ice hunks hung as mud flaps,
parked on the stickball field
where my knuckler baffled
the hitless Great White Hube.

But with the Day-Glo so bitter,
I am tucked up shag carpet safe
curtains drawn to strobe flickers,
with buddies, Kramden and Norton,
grainy ghost-men casting shadows
across the decades of my room.

Bang! Zoom! To the moon!
then around and back,
for a boy with suburbia view.

09/23/2005

Author's Note: photopsycho timetrip.

Posted on 09/23/2005
Copyright © 2026 David Hill