HOUSE
THE HOUSE OF THE SETTING SUN
Like a paradise. Kinda’ place sorta’ kills ya’ inside.
Warm yellow lights. Mexican tile all around. Copper
pots hangin’ over stove. Ya’ know like they got in the
magazines. Blonde people movin’ in and outa’ the
rooms, talkin’ to each other. Kinda’ place you wish you
sorta’ grew up in, ya’ know. (Sam Shepard True West)
orange cylindrical lights with holes carved out wallpaper
mostly turquoise parents champagne taste went to waste in
dog days but by mid-70’s corduroy sectional +lambskin throw
(from Sheila’s in Yorkville) an elaborate phone gold+enamel
leather horsey accessories +horse-head bookends to a life of
racehorse notoriety
these streets filled with doctors +lawyers +nouvea riche shysters
wouldn’t trade it for friend’s father’s jaguar she through a windsheild
on her boston campus at 23 father flew her to best plastic surgeon
tiny abrasions around nose+mouth as we sat in Paris cafe she Sorbonne
rich girl purgatory
my father certain she is lesbian +after me maybe at 10 i stood outside
her ballet classes face pressed against glass ate their rich people’s candy
+ the whitest pistachio nuts known to mankind in Paris she told me her
mother thought her ugly hated herself passionately with a passion i
reserved for the lavish dolls dotting her bedroom from parent’s exotic
travels
one night i crawled through their milkbox +hid behind the couch i missed
my gorgeous parents my ratty brothers +my dog missed my bed with a
hole in it chewed by poodle named dilly my father: that’s one stupid bitch
not a word he used unless describing female canines
i still miss them + know it was the kinda’ place you wish you sorta’ grew
up in from the vantage point of the shredder of mid-life when the pretty
blonde people +the rich neighbours pale in comparison to the raw+authentic
humanity the fervent love+ the hardening of arteries the cancer too
for it is not true that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear we spun
gold out of yarn especially on sunday+monday ed sullivan + howard cosell
the demi gods in the back split house of the setting sun
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2 weeks left of Summer 2017
