Don’t Bury Me in Bloomingdale
© jo wiley

The 300 millionth person was born in the U.S. today,
another paint-by-number squall.
Where one as white and two, bark-brown,
complement silvery A’s and blood-red B’s.
And the burn of air and light
steals the ecstasy of Prahna’s rapture.

Numbers and letters and colors
mingle, murky and irregular.
Squiggles and strokes and dots
merge into a polyhedron and its duality.
A baby’s cry brings his mother’s loving touch
and the touch of a lover brings a world of tears.

The law of attraction and repulsion
binds concrete to the abstract
and the breath of nature is smothered
by asphalt and steel and rubber.
Mingling carbons vaporize and discharge
our energy into the heavens.

We face each other, you and me,
interconnected by our opposites:
male, female; thought, intuition.
You never touch, so I always cry.
Our bodies rooted stoically while spirits collide -- encoded packets of other lives.

And just yesterday I heard that violence,
the meeting of spirit and matter,
has replaced communicable disease
as the number one cause of death.

Inside My Father’s Trunk
© jo wiley

I could fill this page with rage or questions I never dared ask.
But tonight, instead of restive dreams, I dragged your trunk from my attic
and picked through its layers of time.

Long ago it carried your soldier’s handbook,
canteen, mess kit, pistol…and a four page letter to someone named Jane
that proclaimed, I’ll probably wash out in record time.

When I was 16, you forced its dull fatigue green and mustiness on me --
a trade for the dirty yellow utility cart you had once discarded
and I had spray-painted silvery clean.

In anger I camouflaged your past with purple,
covered the stench with flower-power contact paper and assorted symbols of peace
and packed it full of journals filled with hatred toward you.

Ten years later I turned it baby-blue and stacked it full of cloth diapers and onesies,
hoping that my child would finally bring some love from you.
But plaques and tangles filled your brain before life spilled from me.

STOP RAPE and Y.E.S.M.A.A.M.* stickers, emblems of children you never knew,
mingle with memories of both our lives, and a cross-work of duct tape
holds three generations together and keeps all that is left of you inside.

You were wrong back then. It took two years for you to be disqualified to fly.
And me, fifty to find the courage to ask why.

And so tonight I looked for answers in photographs and yellowed clippings,
in tales you kept secret while alive and others sequestered when you died.
Yo-Yo Champion at 14; Clever in leading role; Basketeer Responsible for Great Record.

So much I hadn’t known.

I should be gentle with these fragments of your life, I know. But you never were with mine,
so I tossed the tri-corner folded flag onto a chair and dropped your army records to the floor.
On top, a pay data card from 1945 (your last?) and a log of “exact flying times.”

Eight pages of solo and instrument flights; formations; cross country and nights.
And then the remark, “eliminated from training because of height.”

At five foot five, how did you tower over me and paralyze my life?

* young educated sincere men against asshole misogynists