What I feel, Part 2

 Black Boxes in Greenwich

You could look down the yards and see them

Hear them almost

On spindly legs but coffins the buzzing

Greenheads like heavy bombers drawing blood

After the first wave of strawberry flies

And why they never had strawberry flies or greenheads at Hine Quarters

Where the pool breathed blue and and life was safe

And the women baked like leftover chicken

Except for Addie and Addie

Who hated each other and had thighs like cords

One from Smith and one from high school

Exuding locker rooms that both smelled wet

But for the hatred of nasty words left in lockers

One was my second mother

She died long after her husband and knew me better than my own mother ever did

And then there were the cub scouts

Volkswagen bus to beatings

Knee to the groin then apology

When dads were upright

Told you three counties were the poem

Played songs to make it right

Tom Waits at Academy of Music

Easy chair and nothing easy

Stones I wore the Flying Skull 

Jacket painted with his paint from ceiling drops

He hated army air corps and fans thought I was lefty

Everything smells everything screams and we were

So good looking under pain

Combat missions dry you out

Even when you carry on and on after

Tab collars, Harris tweeds, my mother

Once got a Paris hairdo, beauty

She was and I remember her smell the night

She told me she loved me best

And I think my sister knew before she told me

They ask and they insist about your worst memory

Which is not of either of my parents

I loved but they did not love me the way he did

They thought I was a challenge and a riddle

He knew me

Died when I was fourteen

And came to me on the the 3rd floor

After his funeral

That was the good part the bad part was seeing him

On that hospital bed agèd a hundred years since I’d seen him

A week before

He spoke to me a corpse on the bed

And I could not understand

After the funeral he was clearer

Straight to my mind

He told me to be a good boy

And I promised I would

Then I went back to boarding school

To meet my destiny

Which was nothing like either of us thought it would be

Is this going anywhere

Yes and no

He was the first, middle-named for a street in Germantown in Philly

My dad was junior

Who once tried a punch at his dad as I never did,

Together we’re a superhero 

Which kids could do today

INSTAPUNK FTA: <<“Boppa, my granddad, was a brave bold Christian intellectual. He founded the school my sister and I went to in the elementary years. He volunteered for the military in 1917 and they told him he was rated 4K, meaning, “We draft you after the women and children.” Then he saved a thousand lives and saved me from myself.

Boppa was a saint

Tough and always gentle in the mission to save me from myself

My dad was a warrior

91 combat fighter pilot missions and spotless in his sense of duty

Tough and sometimes cruel in the mission to save the world from me

I am RFLaird III. The dangerous one

They both knew I was a problem

I have always been a problem 

I was the culmination

Why my sister outdid herself to compete with me even when I was a grade behind her

Why my mother never stood up for me and gave me the next worst moment of my life when I reduced her to tears after a dressing down from my father

Why my father never once warned me about the alcohol that nearly ditched his life and just served to double my own great accidental decisions in life

The three of them (us) RFLairds created a perfect wave called me. Why I insisted to Peter Workman that the authorship of The Boomer Bible would be R. F. Laird

Black boxes 

How many greenheads are you?