wish-powered factories of whys

-- That’s not my mother.

-- How do I know?

-- I just told you.

-- The hair?

-- No. But it’s the same.

-- Equally disturbing.

-- A lump sum. Yes.

-- Garages won’t store it.

-- Nope.

-- What she’s not.

-- A mother?

-- Perhaps.

-- Relevant.

-- So-so.

-- On a good day it’d be somebody’s.

-- On the bad?

-- A crumby bumbling…mom?

-- Yes?

-- Nothing. I was just calling. I was just worming my way out of trouble.

-- It’s not.

-- Mother?

-- Yes.

-- How’d one know, if one were to ask, and to whom?

-- It’s different with each gone consonant, each mark of absence, the diacritical hives of repair and redo, redo and do more, and more too.

-- Mother’s not home.

-- Yes. A crestfallen absence.

-- We’re working on togetherness.

-- At all times.

-- A mother’s will and loyalty with a smidgen of love, that’s about what it’d take to launder our souls.

-- Reeking of motherhood. Scented with fabric softener. A hint of Lemon Pledge on the windowsill.   

-- That is what my mother resembles, in a TV-show sort of way: a harpoon delicately balanced on the back of a whale. Who are we to tell what’s different and the same?

-- Mother?

-- No. Feeble. Germ-free. Tagged and twerped with shuffled insecurity.

-- A base to never steal. A mother’s pride and honed instincts for survival. Gosh. No. Golly gosh. Wait. Good gosh? No. Just the same, I guess. Fat with shade and warmth. Mother.

-- Mother, you are my calling card. We have time to never spend.

-- Is it not she?

-- It must be and it cannot.

-- She it is who dwells contrary to logical assumptions, in the space of air between forest trees, in the holdout heavies of another gone-by lurk.

-- Mother, it is or is it not?

-- Who’s asking?

-- A shale-and-rebar sort. An all-year sucker. A crowing has-been cowboy. A pied piper’s stolen quips from the short and over-rested. Mysticeti. Journeymen.

-- As if a mother’s ease could ever be taken for granted. As if mother would swim farther from shore than we’d care to notice. As if mothering’s comfort has termites. Mother, I get shunted for less in the arbor of my days. Put right the works. We are mothered in our born-free nicks.

-- My mother? No. It cannot be, so you’d have this kind of girl believe. So it is, back to the front of this gist, yours and mine alone, that was prattled on through and rescued from the fire escape of what we could never believe maternal guts could achieve. Are we blind to our own estimation? Mother? It can and cannot help, as we choose or do not, as we mingle the threads of upbringing with the fabric of who we’ve become.

-- Mothers.

-- But not mine.

-- Yes, if you’d like.

-- A bundle of care swaddled in banded hope and corrosive persuasion. Twerps like us don’t get what’s what in the chandelier light. It takes car batteries and a hydraulic lift perhaps, something that cranks and has a certain, I don’t know, heft.

-- You fold too easily. I am soon and now in my past, except when it comes to what is, but not what will be, or could.

-- Get it or don’t. I mother my own disasters one boxcar at a time.

-- Trained.

-- No. Steam-engined.

-- Caboosed!

-- Or merely tied to the tracks. Who’d choose one out of not enough?

-- Your mother.

-- It’s not.

-- So says the woman on the brink of squandering somebody else’s good time.  

-- We are tempered with honor here in the Taft-Hartly neons. Phone’s in dispose.

-- So it goes and doesn’t. It is a mannequin bust in a suit jacket obliged to be dull in a store window. The flush of traffic rises and dies in the sunset’s crimson over pylons and cement fixtures in the landscape.

-- A stuttering attempt at streetlight flails, disconsolate with ordinary yellow, and a retreat of cabs is ambushed by a thick swath of braking red.

-- No. It is more a mother’s triumph of life’s sturdy plight, the neglected farming of automobile parts and hard-to-tell curbs, and a nosing of garbage cans, lids clinked like martini glasses all through the night.

-- We are lost in crowded lanes, 12-car pileups, slashed by yellow and white lines, and there’s sugar in the gas tank, and we find it hard to ignore the windshield’s glare.

-- The arrhythmic music of car horns juxtaposed with greedy sirens eloping in the Dopplered distance.

-- We make plans, mother. Yes, mother. We unmake our beds.

-- Ah, the shoddy retreat of valets on the make, the horoscope makers, the cheaters and the almost-nearly bums. It all turns a few less heads than a lion tamer’s first drink of the night. And the rats slither away with all your winnings, most of it burned up in a fire anyway, and the burps keep adding up to a few more nights on the lam. Pouring more than enough drinks into you every night than’d drown a better man for a week, while food and stomach just aren’t getting along.

-- Let’s talk cheap hotel rooms, a bottle of whisky and an ice bucket calling my name. There’s nobody here to tell me that I’m no good. A moon outside the color of soap, and the eyeliner stain on my collar matches my socks, and I’m hard up for box scores and dirty blondes and the smoke of steam engines. I squint through the estuaries of dawn and let the whole damn fort go to hell. It never rains when it should.

-- The ice melts and dews the glass. An old book of names of clowns serves as a coaster.

-- Sometimes you just can’t get alone enough for anything to matter or make sense. The pool splash of a song. The harried reminder of better times in the squashed luck of mother’s lost voice. A cure for jealousy. The best juggler on the block. We get what we get. And it screams no more at the mirror in the dark. I am trampled by what’s not left in the bottle.

-- A no-where-else that I can’t ever remember wishing to be. It whiffs on a full belly but never skimps on the tip.   

-- Mother?

-- No. A sick sense of wonder gone to the dogs.

-- Mother?

-- Nope. Just a wholesome account of the shoddiest means of escape. Buck up and never be counted on again.

-- But those waterfall eyes, the fire-scarred earlobe. The impatience of certain gestures.

-- One and not the same.

-- The crooked slant of her mouth, serious lips chiseled on like crust for an unbaked pie.

-- Who knew?

-- Mother.

-- No. It’s all what we’re left with, and it’s all merrier times sloping leeward towards a wind-ravaged ravine.    

-- Mother knows.

-- Not mine. Not yours. It is a scoop’s mixed results added to a bowlful of apprehension. Which way will the wind blow? And who will be hungry upon leaving?

-- The bottle hangs on. It scrapes and digs in for what it’s worth.    

-- Ah. Yes. The always failing light of ex-splendor.  

-- Mother, make me a pair of shoes instead of wings, or so says so-and-so.

-- It’s around and it’s far.

-- A mother’s failings are not your own. Still, we harbor such stuff as winged hope in the breadbaskets of our bigger selves.

-- Mother. Mother. Make me shoulder your burden while you weep for mine.

-- Shoddy dribble. It don’t take. It really don’t.

-- Are we here then who we really are?

-- Don’t go around mentioning what you never meant to say.

-- Overheating over a mountain pass, something that resembles an uphill journey to you, at least, and it is jumpy at best, the way you react.  

-- Should’ve been a potato eater.

-- Sure. “I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it.” That’s the somehow ticket to nowhere.

-- Not in the teeniest bit of a way. Van Gogh craved disappointment. He wallowed and thrived in it.

-- To sell or not to sell. That it?

-- Not a choice really. It just happens.

-- All mothers let go and grip tighter all the time.

-- Not mine.

-- I didn’t say.

-- My mother’s hair is less auburn. You should’ve noticed.

-- But I wasn’t…

-- Was it yours? Mine?

-- Does the difference matter?

-- I wouldn’t ask, even if I were in favor of such gambling.

-- Groan. Go ahead. Mother was late for dinner. She’d cooked up an awful mess. We were testy, and we got our bedtimes moved up.

-- Whose?

-- More of the difference, moonlighting for the rust of the earth.

-- Not, I tell you, not mine. Not even close. Yours? No. I don’t believe that either.

-- And the fact that we compose a different outcome from either of those suppositions tells more about who we are not then what we’ve always been too timid to become.

-- We?

-- The plural of this countervailed contriving, this glassine for being God-blessed and bountiful.

-- Mother sewed on me a pair of eyes. Mother said, “Here. Try these on.”  

-- Yes. And, “…still I could not see.”

-- Or something-or-the-other as rudimentary.

-- Let’s place the blame as far from home as we can.

-- I don’t attract attention for just anybody.

-- How much is left in the bottle of who we are?

-- A few slugs, maybe. Enough for mother, and therefore for the universe.

-- Certainly less dark and stormy, under the cover of zinnias and convolvulus, as we scurry through self-made scuppers and ostioles of pristine laughter to escape hearing things like, “Pascal’s got a winning record, and Muriel sculpts all her gargoyles for joie-de-vivre drunks in the blood-red sunset.” We are not here to announce such trivialities.

-- That cannot be…that is not my…my…my anything.

-- Oh, mother. Whelps like us were born to hobble. We build graveyards in the jagged rock of mountainsides.     

-- Not mine. Not yours. Not at all like what we’ve always thought and will think.

-- Dear mother, who day by day…

-- …calls back the cruelest April of her prime.

-- Oh, well. Her glass is never quite full enough. The water, it goes and goes, all over and through the country. 

-- Swim out so far, farther than even anybody’s grandmother ever swam, and get back to where you’re going, go out and over it all, and make yourself back and forward into what’s there, not what isn’t. Outlive the barnacles and the seaweed and coral and the insufferable brain in your worried head. Be held and small in the crook of an arm, delicately cradled there, light and innocently soft; and then gnash down with all you’ve got into that arm. Take it. It does not belong to you. Go ahead. It’s not only necessary, it’s vital. 

-- …Mother?