Gift #1 - 21 shell casings

Hey.

Back in the city.  Spent a week in CA to see my family.  Buried my father Friday.

Still not well. Bad head cold. Sleeping no more than an hour or so a night.

This week, I'm gonna write about seven gifts, ones from past and present, that I've been given or that I've given out.  It's a way to keep moving.

And, to really kick my ass, I'm using the first gift as a chance to write my first new poem in over a year and a half.

Before I was an actor, before I was a writer or a singer or a playwright or a songwriter, I wrote poems.  Thousands of terrible poems. I wouldn't even talk to women.  I'd just write them these impromptu poems and leave them at their table.  Or while sleeping on a train. I thought poetry would forgive me. Minored in poetry writing in college.  For five years, earned more money and awards after college for poetry than I did in acting. And the poems slowly became more cohesive - less second-hand e.e cummings and Russell Edson - and more authentic.

But then I self-published a book of poems, RAMSHACKLE  (it's so cheap and so good and it has poems about people eating suitcases and drunk weathermen - go buy it like crazy) ,  and I stopped.  Acting and songwriting took over.

Here's the poem and the description of the first gift.


FIND THE PEA

The flag, folded and snug,
Slouches against my mother's breast.
My brother, with quiet mercy,
Offers her his hand. 
My nephew paws at the lip of his hoodie,
Trips and shuffles along the grass with his father.
My sister warms her brittle fingers.
She does not cry.      She keeps
Tradition.

I ease out of the wobbly plastic chair
when the honor guard captain
taps me on the shoulder.  I turn,
and see him hold up the shells
from the twenty one gun salute.

He grabs my hand,
slides the metal caskets across my palms.

People keep these.

My father in ashes, not three feet away
boxed in a wooden enclosure the size of a newborn.

He has a shell.

My brother, his humor, his love.
My sister, her son, her resolute strength
My mother, her faith , her determined ability to tell the same story seven different ways
to seven different people.

I'm going rotten
And I know it
If I don't grow some enamel quickly