Pick Your Poison, or, “Agency”

      You’ve gotta take a bath, m’dear!

      So what’ll it be: toy boat or bath beads?

      This shirt or that? Frat or sorority?

      Getting fresh or canned? Marching

      band or the rugby squad? Salisbury

      mistake or the over-overdone cod?

      Now or later, either/or, more or less.

      Confess or burn! Gordon Korman

      or Where the Red Fern Grows?

      Prose or poetry, science or art? Fart

      or hold it (just for fun). Italics

      or bold (Choose. One.). Comic Sans

      or Papyrus; it’s so funny to know

      there’s no life without this virus.

      M psych ward roommate or F?

      Bibliography or References?

      I am not the source. But so glad

      you asked about my preferences.

      Becoming Mischling of the Second Degree on Suicidal Christmas

      Mischling of the second degree:

      A person with one Jewish grandparent; “mischling” is from the German for “mixed,” “half-breed”; what I am (a fact learned in my early thirties); something hidden in a tangle of abuse, booze, anti-Semitism, poverty and lies—knotted rosary beads sunk to the bottom of a rum tumbler; constitutive absence; the inscrutable wound over which I ran my tongue; the silence around which life was structured.

      I.

      My new name tag reads like a crime

      and I know that’s a full sentence

      even if my creed is inconsistency

       Hi My Name Is… Mixed Feelings!

      Nanny. A man named Block and she committed me in 1953.

      I was not premeditated but their hot want

      ought to stand up as malice aforethought.

      Reckless engenderment of bastard granddaughter [sic]

      but it took sixty-two years for them to get caught

      between the sheets of their Liverpool Street sin. Are they

      the syncopation in the beat to which I tap my feet

      as I imagine life as a bail session from which to abscond?

      At the bank trading in papyrus bonds

      jaundiced babies point to me.

      I’m mischling of the second degree

      which means I’m not, legally, blond.

      Punishment is time severed, guillotined hands

      and heads, or the busted bamboo knots that bind

      wrists to beds if one refuses one’s meds

      or writes too many singsong rhymes.

      Too many times we have been belated.

      When he died, I started wearing Dad’s watch

      until the strap broke and it got lost.

      Idle hands operate on mundane memories:

      How I could never hula-hoop. Afternoons walking

      the track. A life-sized motorized Santa Claus

      of which only its pelvis moved. Air Cadet weekends

      tucked into a Windsor Park barrack three blocks

      from where my father was conceived. Do the things

      from which people protect you tend to be the very things

      you need? Then, an interruption—impromptu college

      lecture on criminal obstruction and the concept of mens rea.

      The PowerPoint says: ceci n’est pas un “PowerPoint,”

      but: For the mid-term exam, brainstorm a theory of life

      as the hardest, drunk scavenger