The Blood Poetry

Chapter 2

“We have to look for her, Papa. She’s missing missing?”

The Meat Spigot comes to the table adorned with a gold handle and I put my mouth up to its mouth and draw on the deep, red blood of it all.

“How the hell can you get drunk right know on fermented meats?!”

“Oh, bacteria, Satan…”

“Waitress?” my daughter exhorts. “Can you wrap all of our stuff to go?”

“Bud?” the waitress asks of me, still gnawing on that erect and honed-down pencil.

I slurp and do no good whatsoever and the acid reflux is upon me, indeed and, “I guess so, but can you fix me a container of Meat Spigot Exclamation Juice?”

“Of what?”

“Bring me the fermented tubular meats,” I say with a grinding-of-teeth sound, “OK?” I ask, “Are you bosomy enough?”

The waitress leaves, and…

“We gotta go, Papa.

“Really?”

“Give me your f*****g cell phone. I can’t find mine. I lost it, fuck.”

I give her the phone and implicate myself in my thoughts and I must’ve been a shriveled loon believing I could be a good father when I conceived Sylvia, having an undead mother, and all, who’s tethered between tranquility and murder. I slop down the alcoholic meats to forget the world and, “s**t, this is good! Whiskey, dreams!”

“Oh, just great. You don’t have any phone numbers in here.”

“I have no one to call except you and your mother.”

The waitress brings the packages of food. “Here’s your bill,” and walking away, she mutters, “f*****g asshole.”

“Give her the money, Papa.”

I fork over a couple of notes and we get up and Sylvia speed-walks with a wispy gait and, so, I follow her every moment that I can, but…

“We gotta get home, like yesterday, Papa, like come on, come on, we gotta f*****g find my phone so we can make calls to all my familiars and find Mom to bring her back to me because I don’t have anyone else!”

We speed-walk through the parking lot, me following her, toward my insidious vehicle which has been parked there for days and, just then, a one hundred-year-old black hobo—his socks mended to his gangrenous skins—hurls pennies across the pavement toward us like they’re his last and most important thoughts.

“s**t,” I exclaim. “Look, a penny, 1938, Sylvia! The year your grandmother was born!”

I discover, then, that the black hobo is looking straight up and harbors resentment against outer space, and he must be hugging his freakish dead mommy in his mind, and he wishes he was suffocating in some deep and anonymous grave.

***

“Earl, have you seen my mother?”and Sylvia stands at the kitchen table with the phone crotched between her shoulder and cheek. “Really? I didn’t know that about her…” and she tears up a bit and I sit on the couch with the television on, staring at her and I have a picture of Abby in my back pocket that I swear I have never defiled and, “Earl, she’s been gone since last night, my dad told me…I didn’t see her this morning…It’s not like her at all…” and she coughs and, “The gums were bleeding when you saw her last? What?” and Sylvia taps her foot on the linoleum with her shoes untied but, “I don’t know, Earl he’s sitting right here…” but she doesn’t even look at me and, “He said he looked for my mom this morning, but he didn’t even call anybody…” and the sunlight pokes through which I’m allergic to, the sun and the ultraviolet rays, “Yes, please help, Earl, should I come over?” and she listens and there is silence on her end for at least two minutes and her face is wet, so I lick my lips and, then…

I’m gripped by the life-story of a serial killer on the television and tone deaf to our lives, but Sylvia hangs up.

“Papa, Earl is going to help—”

“I don’t like Earl.” I dig in my ear because it itches so badly. It always does in times of distress because I think it’s the tiny ear hairs that bug me, like yellow jackets burping around the ear drum and the recesses of my brain.

“Does that matter?” she asks.

“I suppose not…” I look through the television, into the killer, and into my being and, “I suppose nothing matters more than your mother.”

“Hello?!”

“Stop it, Sylvia. Please, just stop it.”

“You yank me out of school, running like a madman into the schoolyard, embarrassing me in front of my friends, and now you’ve come to your senses and you think she’s fine? Really?”

The killer on TV speared an old lady and he did this to fourteen women and one dorkish boy but, “I’m sorry,” I say, “I never meant to scare you.”

Sylvia sits on the couch, far from me. She puts her head in her hands and there are those minutes from last night that I can never speak about, as the dust in the living room floats like a capital zero and, almost daily, I have come to the verge of weeping and dying. If anyone deserves suicide, it’s me. “Sylvia, we can go looking for her but—” I catch myself just in time and the killer on TV has a bungled beard and mustache and looks a little bit like a tracheotomy.

“Where will we go?”

I look directly at her forehead, but not into her eyes and answer, “A house of disrepute—”

“God, motherfucker.” Sylvia scales back her hair from her face and forms a dour expression and I try really, really hard not to pay attention to my daughter, the whole hidden world inside her because there are angels there. And inside me, are stone cold killers. “Papa, we need to find her, like yesterday.”

“OK,” and I sympathize with her, I really do, so I turn off the television and sit like this, hmm, for some seconds, trying to think of the null-set or foul play because everyone in our house is endangered. I have grown beards and my mother, a vampire, is drunk on junkie blood, lives her undead life among the sleepiness of demons in our house—the dregs of a stupid f*****g community. “I love you, Sylvia,” and I nearly weep and stare at my pulpy hands that are connected to limbs and joints and nerves and the brain, connected to my wasting and demented self…

“Uh huh, you love me,” and she snuggles her head on the back of the couch. “I could have invented calculus and you wouldn’t even know.”

“Did you?”

“I think not.” She gets up and goes into her bedroom Are we going or aren’t we?

I think and I think. I go into my bedroom, too, where on the dresser is my wife’s bra laid out with a wound in the right breast and a thumb-dot of blood. The bra thinks of itself as more important than it is, but really it is very, very important because there are things about men and braziers that one should never mention…so I look in the mirror above the dresser and see that I am a man with holes in his face; a man with a distracted ambivalence who falsifies love (It’s not true!) I tell myself and (I do love!) and Abby’s bra is my beacon, my nemesis, as the erection rises and falls in a nanosecond and that, in short, is the life of my desire…I look at my car keys and I should go, I don’t go (help!) and the car should start without me and barrel down the street screaming for my wife and look for any signs of the her: on the bare concrete walls, in abandoned buildings, under beds, in meat lockers, in entertainment centers, in coffins, under other zombies…psst, over here, I love shows about all killers, prisons, kidnappings, etc, as much as the next guy, but I eat television, but really, I’m a lively spirit not full of any venom, no sir, because I, too, am an English school teacher and a dude, so over to my daughter, Sylvia’s room I go scratching my head because I think I have dandruff. I imagine opening her bedroom door quietly where she would be splayed like a dreamer with her limbs in all kinds of wrong directions and I think of her and I love her, but I’m a failure and she is true redemption. It’s all so f*****g terrible; I have acne on my chest.

***

So this is the nonexistence with the Junkie Thomas Ogre coming once per week to feed his blood to my mother in between her other feedings. I usually see Mother in her wig pompousness, dresses straight out of doomsday—green, of course, but she was once beautiful and now, she is a vampire and always will be even when all of us are extinct—her face of white dough that you wanna stab to check if she’s done. I envision her mostly in my insomnia when she lets Junkie Thomas wake her out of slumber to give her the blood which she drinks straight from the syringe.

And now, there is loud banging upstairs in Mother’s room, so I go a-lurking and that bedroom will be hellish like nuclear and gynecologically hot because it’s my mother, dear of vampires—her dimpled old face—but she definitely won’t bite you if she takes a liking to you and, no, you definitely can’t let her do that because you know exactly what will happen. As I open her bedroom door, I see she’s asleep and lying on her back adorned in a full-length fur coat, a gold wig, slippers and a blood-numbing white stare while asleep and awake at the same time. Mother hasn’t aged well at all because vampires don’t really hold onto their youth as is claimed, but maybe it’s the quality of the blood they imbibe that makes the difference. I guess I do love her somewhat, but it doesn’t matter, no, because she thirsts for blood and I can’t forgive her for killing cats (just cats?) in my childhood, although vampires can’t sustain themselves on animal blood alone; it’s a human thing, like murder is a human thing and it makes me angry, really f*****g angry, that she’ll live her numbers up until god-only-knows what century, and I’ll be dead by then, decomposed, my spirit tangled up in the electrical grid. Thanks to our beloved god, since what I want most is to take a nosedive straight through the river. I have my wife, Abby, to obsess about and, most importantly, Sylvia—the sweet number who’s my offspring and only daughter. And Mother? Go f**k the old broad! She’s got Junkie god damned Thomas to keep her company!

“You have awakened the old woman,” she croaks and cavorts about the darkness and through the room, in one corner and out the next without moving her body one inch, but Mother’s voice and unctuous breath flits through the drapes, and under the bed, through history, arriving out of nowhere and, “Come to Mother, my Epstein, and what person have you brought for me, now?” but she has yet to grow bat wings because that’s all bullshit, bullshit I say, and yet her body and spirit and knowledge are splintered through a prism and she flies and she’s everywhere and nowhere, yet plunges through the mirror without it shattering and through time-and-space and through me yet, “What a spine you have, my Epstein,” which freaks out all of my organs, including myself, as if I’m going to s**t centaurs. I can’t show any bit of terror, no f*****g way, because although I told you she wouldn’t ravage you if she takes a liking, taking a liking can turn on a dime for her because, of course, she’s undead and her reasoning, empathy and conscience are so far from god, that she’s beyond evil and atheism and inhabits the vortex of our galaxy’s Black Hole. She beckons, “Come, dote on your poor mother, my Epstein—” pneumonia hack, phlegm and all “—you haven’t loved me so much since you were a little boy—” more black bile “—than you did last night.” And the black hacking mixed with her laughter and her bloodlust and her backside of hell terrifies me so thoroughly, that all I can manage is: