I Accept
I've been carrying around questions
for the treatment facility in my pocket all week:
How long is the typical stay?
What is the visitor policy?
Do you accept Aetna insurance?
There's something about keeping them close
to my heart that makes me want to believe
you'll soon start eating again
and won't be needing them anymore.
But the luck rabbit's foot clasped to my backpack
in elementary school didn't prevent Marc Morsey
from beating the crap out of me.
Just look how it turned out for the rabbit.
My middle school pleas to heaven
to make Robyn LeStam fall in love with me
only succeeded in teaching what humiliation feels like.
The daily affirmations I read each morning
won't prevent others from trying to exploit
the optimism I strive to project.
I'm going to have to hear my own voice
inform the person who answers the phone
my daughter has been diagnosed with anorexia.Victory Party
Despite the beard, the congressman-elect has a baby face.
He's tall, trim, a West Point graduate, a veteran.
His family comes complete with two cherubic young boys
and a waifish pixie of a wife. It's as if he were molded
in a central casting laboratory and rolled out at the moment
the country faces a generational existential crisis.
For the next week, every Democrat-friendly major news
program on which he's booked is going to ask him to repeat
his message, mid-term election prediction, and vision
for America in the same number of characters he used
to tweet it the minute networks declared him the winner.
He's the same man who asked me six months ago
for insight into raising two kids after his son was born.
He's the one who praised my letters to the daily newspaper,
and was the run-away favorite among the county executive
candidates four years ago.
He looks so natural up there at the dais. So...presidential.
He keeps insisting he “can't believe it.” Too Late
There's a reason we revere Socrates today,
but holding court in the streets like a Mardi Gras
entertainer, encouraging Athenians to examine
their lives while his wife Xanthippe ran around
cuckolding him, didn't exactly paint him
in the most favorable light. Many were relieved
when the hemlock the state forced him to drink
brought the end he insisted we shouldn't fear.
Jesus said, “No prophet is acceptable
in his hometown,” and he would know.
Since people refused to listen to him
with their own ears, Vincent Van Gogh
gave them one of his. Unfortunately,
most don't understand metaphor, so the sad,
misunderstood painter became just another
ignominious artist whose work is now worth millions.
Herman Melville spent a year and a half writing
Moby Dick, only to see it fall out of print
after selling 3,000 copies. It wasn't until
he had died an obscure New York customs inspector
critics began extolling Melville's brillance.
Once he's dead, it's pretty safe to assume
being labeled a genius isn't going to go to anyone's head,
but maybe we ought to try to be a little more supportive
from now on to that blind blues guitarist in Penn Station
and the woman at the kiosk in the mall who draws
ten-dollar portraits in under five minutes.
Those sci-fi stories the weird kid in class creates
could be about more than just robots and spiders
from Rigel-7. That bard you dismissed because
you hated poetry in high school sees life a little more
clearly than we've been able to after all this time.To a Son Lost
I don't think that way anymore.
Perhaps I never actually did.
There were things I said I abhorred,
but I don't think that way anymore.
Occasionally I still wonder where you're
headed and how you're going to live.
I don't think that way anymore.
Perhaps I never actually did. This is About You
For dumping him, Ernest Hemingway got even
with Agnes Von Kurowsky, the nurse he fell in love
with while her patient during the first world war,
by concluding A Farewell to Arms with Catherine Barkley,
the character on whom she's based, hemmorhaging
to death after childbirth.
I share that so you undestand the potential I have
for revenge now that you're in this poem.
I could really do a number on you if I were
so inclined, especially since there's no chance in hell
you'll even be caught dead wasting your feeble
gray matter on poetry. Not even you will know
it's you, and your reputation will be subjected
to undergraduates' tortured interpretations
long after we both have shuffled off our mortal coils.
But maybe I ought to save the invectives
for another day, another poem. The weather
is just too beautiful at the moment and I spent years
furnishing an acceptable place for you in my subconscious
so I'd never have to feel this way again.
Ted Millar teaches English at Mahopac High School. His work has appeared in "50-Word Stories", "Warp 10", "Fictional Cafe," "Little Somethings Press," "Grand Little Things," "Words and Whispers," "Fleas on the Dog," "Better Than Starbucks," "Straight Forward Poetry," Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process (Codhill Press, 2018), "Crossways," "Caesura," "Circle Show," "The Broke Bohemian," "The Voices Project," "Third Wednesday," "Tiny Poetry: Macropoetics," "Scintilla," "Inklette," "The Grief Diaries," "Cactus Heart," "Aji," "Wordpool Press," "The Artistic Muse," "Chronogram," "Brickpligh"t and "Inkwell."