Gene Barry writes

Stuffing Hanks

One day I will cry forever.
Not like a terrace loser,
or a baby-faced softy,
you know, a terminal cry.
I will stoke my engine with
nights-without-sleep and invasions, 
childhood floggings and hidden wounds,
attacks and black-suited fiends. 
I won’t forget to douse the unexpected 
with rivers of anal blood and
floods of small-boy tears.
I will hold up all of those walls 
I’ve fallen off and hidden behind
with screaming wrongs 
and decorate my sky
with pointing children’s fingers.
A cortege of forbidden questions 
will at last assemble
and trod with notice 
to a brand new place of old
where every squeezed-open
pair of perfect ears
will finally embrace 
my slowest form of death.
And they will no longer speak of the 
odd-little-boy who grew to be
that strange-kind-of-fella,
always the loner decorating corners,
the weirdo and the dark horse
and I will meet the dark father
dressed in dresses from the dark box,
the groomer of my un-lived life.
I will wear my coat of fury and
beat and stomp and slap and bite down hard,
return the pent-up painful years of screams,
accuse and insult and verbally stab deep.
I will hand back shame,
stuff hanks of guilt deep into his larynx;
I will pleasure for my first time.
That same day a man will 
fall into the carefully-planned
death of a family and each season
his only friend who understood him
will refuse to yield the buried
pictures of childhood he’d sown.



Der Gespaltene (The Split One) -- Peter Birkhäuser