poem of the day 10.23.14

did it leave a mark?

            --after hosho mccreesh

it seemed all the boys in school had bb guns

as if they were going through a gun toting phase

in the era of reagan, rambo and the terminator

they were the closest those boys in the suburbs

could get to actual violence

without fists and blood

i didn’t have a bb gun

i had baseball cards and baseball gloves

and beatles records instead

my old man told me

with your luck, son, you’d find a way to kill yourself

which was probably true

and no one wanted to become an anecdote

to a soon-to-be-classic christmas film

so i indulged my violent tendencies whenever i could

hanging around the lucky

shooting targets in the dirt or taped onto trees

aiming at squirrels or winter birds

ray hardy had old baseball cards

that he’d line up on a pool table in his basement

we’d shoot at them

putting holes in pete rose and nolan ryan

and the other cards we’d never kept in good enough condition

to one day retire on

ray’s bb gun was one of those pump guns

or they were all pump guns

again…i wouldn’t know

one time when it was my turn to fire

i pumped that mother the full ten pumps

and like the idiot that i was

i fired it right off while ray was still setting us up

a field of von hayes cards

i got him right in the ass cheek

then i stood there

a clueless john wayne on a vast wyoming range

while ray danced around his basement

screaming and crying

shit, i hoped his parents wouldn’t come down

i was happy that they listened to their television loudly

when ray finally calmed

and came over to me wiping his eyes

i thought that he was going to take the gun

and beat me with it

shoot me right in my ass too

but instead he hopped on an edge of the pool table

and pulled down his pants

ray showed me his bare left ass cheek

with one amazing red welt plastered on it

looking at me so sad and expectant

before he said

jesus christ, man

did

it

leave

a

mark?