“What are you thinking about?”
My wife’s voice penetrates
that dark place I’ve once again entered
and yanks me back to the light of here and now.
I gaze at her like a man roused from a dream
only it wasn’t a dream but a nightmare.
“Nothing,” I answer.
But that’s a lie, after all, nobody thinks about nothing.
As for me—sometimes I think about murder.
I don’t mean to. I don’t want to. It just happens,
though usually there’s some sort of trigger.
Take, for example, Phil Collins’ song, "In the Air."
"In the Air" never fails to kidnap my thoughts,
and drag them back to the night of my first murder
where my mind’s eye again sees
the large kitchen knife, the perforated body,
and the blood. The blood. Everywhere.
Sometimes the trigger is a smell.
Like how the hot breath of sun-cooked asphalt
blows me back to a blistering day
where, in the baking-sheet parking lot of a tavern
another one of my murders lay sprawled
like a gangster-clad gingerbread man.
“You were just staring at the ground,” she says.
But the saddest trigger is how the sight
of a young mother with children,
can sometimes shove my mind
into that dark place where another young mother
lies on a couch, her throat just slit with a hunting knife,
her bright eyes pleading with me to save her.
But it’s too late for this young mother.
The light of life slowly dims and her eyes glaze with death.
Her three children sleep in their beds
oblivious to their sudden orphanage.
I pick up a little girl, press her face to my Kevlar-armored chest,
and hope my stifled sob doesn’t wake her.
Gerald So reads "Sometimes I Think about Murder":
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Terry confesses: "The exchange in the poem between my wife and I took place while sitting poolside in Aruba on vacation. The realization that—while my body was there in paradise—my mind was in a much darker place, so shocked me that I decided to write the poem."
4 comments:
Touching poem from a great writer and friend.
Many will seek escape in a bottle or a song, or just stare at their family and bury the evil of death in memories of a vision still repressed in the mind. Almost every police officer or first responder will have a traumatic experience that lingers like an eternal birthmark. Terry, your words are incisive and touch on events that we insulate under an intentional silence. Please continue to stimulate through words of reprise and latent scenery a world many reflect on but never live in participation.
Thank you for your comments Kathy Otten and Tom Kelly. Tom, it sounds as if you may have seen a thing or two, yourself.
Some of the things Terry has seen...are almost unimaginable...if you never walked in his shoes.
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