Poem Collection - MythOfHappiness - 26. Bubblegum Elegy

I can’t chew bubblegum:

lungful nostalgia blows bigger until

POP! My insides like

coca-cola bubbles, sweet on

the tip of the same tongue

that drew glistening trails

over ridges all smooth.

Fucking in the kitchen

where my mother smoked

cigarettes; her ash-tray kisses on

wednesday after church let out

almost covered up the whiff of brimstone.

Sobbing like a bitch in my bedroom

sheets sticky with our dried

“come over” you’d plead,

snapping pink sugar into the phone

shatters my contrition.

Excuses rattle off,

rice in the rainstick

calling for the flood.

Her nod, ashtray overflowing,

keys ring out like music as I shoot for the door.

Your room skunk stank

ripped up posters all misremembered,

candy-sweet smoke in the air

that was your breath.

Hours we’d lay bereft of clothes,

indistinguishable in piles on your floor.

Hours I'd feel like belonging

didn’t belong to somebody else,

the snap of gum you’d share in class

the only other sound that seemed real.

But secrets don’t stay ours forever

and fathers don’t want sissies for sons.

Another school might as well

be another world back then.

Nobody keeps in touch with their first:

time can’t travel upstream,

but I don’t chew bubblegum

anymore.