Brandon Shane – Two Poems

Light Falling From The Sky

There’s this moment, my father lying down
and everyone is around him, weeping,
but it’s just us here. He’s looking at me
like a child would, tilting his head
and for a second, he giggles,
no one knows what to do, but I giggle
in return, and for that moment there, thin
as an eyelash, I see the old man
at the demolished church he was baptized in,
walking up the steps in solemn black dress,
the priest, scratching his hairy chin,
then dunking my father’s head into water,
thinking there was enough time to inhale,
drowning him for a second.

I held Father’s hand as the machines beeped,
enough high-pitched noises to go mad
and drive someone off a cliff, but not enough to
overthrow this moment. This moment, seized,
and nurses sprinting in, doctors preparing treatments,
rain falling like coins onto the hospital.
Tears washed over him like fountains,
and I could hear him in my head:
oh man oh man oh man
this is really it, I can’t believe
this is really it. He was splitting, into heaven,
a one-serving earthquake that could
topple the world if there was enough
to go around.

I know stories of great atrocity,
and have seen pictures depraved enough
to become a recluse, but this,
knowing it was not yet his time, still young
for the twenty-first century,
knowing the grave reality
was that no-one cared
about his decades of public service,
and that, besides cancer,
he was healthier than most men
in their twenties.

I try to swallow the indecency
of death’s final proceeds
rile up the acid in my bloated gut,
and hope it digests, conducting
the controlled demolition of my body,
but the experience is somewhere else,
and the memory
is stuck to all the other wonderful
memories, like my mother’s smile,
and her rare glee, and my sister’s
sobriety, drinking mulled wine
in a Paris Christmas market;
and then comes, rushing,
everyone at my father’s baptism
is now buried,
himself included.

Under the Bridge

Death is expensive,
and the dame is sick;
the old house upon a hill
is just another expensive thing
other people want,
like all the great cathedrals
of the world, everyone gawks
but little believe; how strange
is the wood
that has lost its familiar groan;
and that song my father used to hum
now reminds me of food poisoning,
speeding late night to the veterinarian,
how my humor has become so dry
not even the desert can tell,
and sometimes I go to church
see another God in Christ,
brown-bag malt liquor,
laugh that the priest
is driving a new sports car.

I loved my boyfriend
before all the women
masked as Saint Paul,
and prayed to Jesus,
because this summer
reminded me of hell,
and in spirit, I resided with the cricket
squashed on my floor,
but more-so, the gay toads that look
like the effigy of Charles Bukowski
parading his cock to men,
or Hemingway’s suicidal closet,
the many great queer writers
convicts, shoving, would-be-knives
plunged into their chests,
if not having died for the pen.

Farewell, beloved father,
a tragic death in a world subsumed
by holy men in public squares,
fallen to scandal,
resurrected by scripture;
there is something so beautiful
about their psychopathy;
how powerful is the cathedral,
the pews, always filled,
the audience wants
nothing more than a star,
weakened by vulnerabilities,
to seek shared glory
in All-Knowingness.

All this is to say,
I have wrung your towels,
read the books recommended
over many holidays,
repeating, how loss can be
something other than loss,
a new beginning,
and I say, the cross is gone,
it has been lit on fire
too many times,
and bad men have taken over,
they have made good
with all the terror
in the world.

The tickets to your opera
sold out,
I contain an empty auditorium.

Nearly thirty years
you have been my father,
and I still remember
that useless moment
in grade school;
this place of yours will
remain, still;
let me ramble until sundown,
pretend you are alive,
let me weep knowing
it is all over.

BIO: Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka Japan. You can see his work in trampset, the Argyle Literary Magazine, Berlin Literary Review, Acropolis Journal, Grim & Gilded, Ink in Thirds, Out of the Box Poetry, among many others. He will graduate from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English. Find him on Twitter @Ruishanewrites

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