Focus Group

by Carl Watson

And what about you? someone asked.
I never had much to say, I said,
About growing up and stuff,
Though I’ve imagined fantastic scenes:
My naked father hunting me like a fawn
Through the forests of The North
With his fishing spear and beer can,
Hunting me like a sewer rat through
Industrial borderlands, he being aged,
Resentful, and my mother raging
With her broken broom handle, torn dress,
And her blackened racoon eyes,
Like gothic specs tattooed to her face.
But these are dreams, not real events.

There’s much of the real I don’t remember:
It’s odd how I can’t recall, for instance.
Joy or the loving bonds of family.
They somehow got lost in the editing,
Redactions that took place amongst screams
Humiliation, and all the hiding:
Hiding under canopies of spider webs}
In the corner of our horror movie basement,
Hiding behind couches, in culverts,
In sewer pipes spilling local secrets
At the edge of town.
All my life, I’ve hid from conflict,
Even hid from love and its deceptions.
I remember that powder blue Chevy wagon
In the K-Mart lot, a sack of French fries,
And the milk shake, bought as a bribe,

While each one asked who and what I wanted.
You have to decide, they said.
But I did not.

In retrospect, it doesn’t seem much,
Compared to the lives of others,
Compared to the massive tragedies we see.
But it was life before I knew the lives of others.
People did explain this to me: you’re too sensitive.
You’re over-affected by small things.
And I was, and still am.
I remember running through fields as a boy,
Trying to break open the emptiness,
Trying to make myself a flesh and bone body hammer
Pounding at the glass walls of the prison
Of childhood, while chasing the miraculous
I knew must be out there.

I remember,
One late summer evening, punching the air
While running the streets of my town,
Wearing heavy hiking boots
With home-made chains as weights
To worry my ankles,
Because I loved pain, and wanted more,
A local law officer pulled alongside,
Rolled down his window, concerned, and asked,
“What are you running from, son?”
I said I was just running,
And I’m still just running, I said
Just let me run.