Issue #1: “The Secret Origins of YOUNG MAN!”
Issue #1: “The Secret Origins of YOUNG MAN!”
Country house. Old. Gray. Almost a shanty.
Short and rotund, Mother works in small herb garden.
Her skin is dark. Her hair in a pony tail. Her hands dirty.
It is Mother’s Day and Young Man is not at home
when the blood vessel in his mother’s head falls in
on itself. Boxers call it “punch drunk”—
the body unaware that the mind has already fallen
so it moves of its own accord, unsteady. A split-hulled ship
dollied on the fingers of a flagging wind. Mother comes in
from the garden, manages to reach the marriage bed
that gave her three children—none are home.
The failing gait of her body tries to speak to her husband.
He—a character between villain and hero—hears only the television.
In the arms of canned laughter, Mother falls asleep, smiling,
not knowing that she is smiling. Through the night,
her dreams are wet, black clouds. A red tide rises up
her skull’s walls. The next day Young Man returns
from his trip, his arms hugging comic books—books that took him
three days away and, eventually, gave him a lifetime of memory.
Comic books that will fill the gaps in his collection. The house is a ringing chasm
he will not see as he adds his new gains to his shelves—
row after row of hero under mylar: Silver Age X-Men, Golden Age Flash,
Bronze Age this and that, high quality issues of Captain America—
Joe Simon autographed the one far, far in the back of the collection.
It is this one Young Man loves most, the one that cost so much.
The seller said that it was only a matter of time before Simon was dead
and death always increases the value of common things. Meanwhile,
Mother lies in a hospital bed, almost an hour’s drive away, her tongue
forgetting how to speak, her body’s left side seceding,
giving up its ability to hold her son—even if he would still let her—
and her husband clings to a pay phone, dialing home again
and again, as Young Man sprawls across his bed, lost
in one comic book after another. He does not hear the empty house.
He does not see the half made sandwich drawing flies on the counter,
the waste basket of vomit in the mother’s room, next to her bed,
the telephone receiver overturned on the living room floor.
The final comic from his latest acquisition is the story of Captain America
regaining his sight after a battle with the Red Skull.
It is old, but it will outlast the mother. Young Man does not
register that yesterday was Mother’s Day nor does he smell
the scent of decay as his comic books—unmoving, unsmiling
in their tended beds—begin their path to yellowing,
going brittle, decaying silently, completely unaware of him.
*This poem appears in The SNReview
Taken from “…hide behind me…”
click to hear me read this poem
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