Tuesday, September 20, 2016

As If You Were a Prize


You know you had to have relied on them, your mom and dad –
though can’t recall much of it now. You dreamed last night
that you were crammed into a love seat with them, sitting
for a portrait: discomfiting because whenever you looked up

into their eyes, they didn’t look remotely like the mom and dad
you knew: they weren’t your parents’ shape and size nor had
their faces or panache: where were your father’s bushy eyebrows,
and extravagant moustache? Your mother’s elegant brown hair?

This simulacra pair of mom-and-dad belonged to who knows
whom: and yet, wedged next to them in that warm room, you
held hard to their forearms: and they affectionately kept you
in the middle, cozy on their laps and thighs, as if you were a prize –

quite the most important little human being ever born. Then you 
woke up, and wondered if to anyone that’s ever what you’d seemed 
or were. And though you didn't know that this would summon 
them, your dad and mom appeared like that – without a stir.

You kissed him, you kissed her.







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