JBN self-identifies as a label-resistant American native of variegated hues. His children’s musical Chimes: A Christmas Vaudeville premiered in Fairbanks, Alaska, with Santa Claus in attendance, opening night. He is host/facilitator for the Hell’s Kitchen International Writers’ Roundtable, which meets twice monthly at Manhattan’s Columbus Library: walk-ins are welcome.
A Rap: To the Over-Eager
Perhaps you have to do
What you think you have to do.
Perhaps, however, you don’t really have to.
Perhaps it’s only what you think you want.
But take it from me, kid, consequences haunt
And ghosts do linger and cankers grow—
Don’t you think that I should know?
Oh I’m not saying don’t
But that perhaps it’s wise to stall.
It’s their funeral but it’s your Fall.
[A mother]
A mother
cannot be a poet.
There’s too much to do.
A mother cannot see the newborn as
the hope of the future
the glitter in the firmament
the lifeblood con¬summation of all cause
and certainly not as
the onset of intract¬able death.
A mother-poet like that must go mad.
And yet—
A mother cannot help
but be a poet
As she protects the progeny from
non-existent dangers
imagined threats—every bush at night a bear—
and acts as if she herself were
the young thing’s swaddling armor till
a ripe age when the cloth is shred
to rags, the metal rusts and clanks, while
all that remains unsaid below the surface
lies still
and cold as the ice in the ocean, while
hot as all the lava that laces the hells of living earth.
And when the child folds into an adult—
A mother cannot possibly be a mother,
which, in fact, she can only be,
and cannot help,
but cannot help
but help.
I hope these sundry paradoxes
help you understand
your mother.
The Language of Encouragement
When the cat was new the claws and teeth
were trained before they’d become bayonets;
the leaps and junkets to exotic lands,
no reprimand from you but twee caresses
and glee in a soprano register
that passed for kitty talk. Destruction did
not mount to much, yet.
And when he grew
he walked all over every gut and scalp
the same as ledges, as if all were his,
leaving a wake of shattered cachepots’ shards
and desultory scratch marks. See how easy
and natural it is for him, now free
and fully formed, to join the terrorists.