I had a full and wonderful Father’s Day weekend—my wife bought me some nice collared shirts, and my kids gave me a t-shirt with a Rubik’s Cube on it that (God willing) I’m planning to wear for an upcoming photography session for a secret special thing. My kids know I love Rubik’s Cubes; I learned to solve them late in life, and I’m no speed demon, but the mere fact that I can spin the parts in the right direction to turn chaos into order—well, it gives me hope of doing the same in my writing, and my life. (There are few better feelings than seeing the puzzle suddenly make sense, and look the way it’s supposed to look; with the books I’m proudest of writing—Alone on the Moon and Island of Clouds and, to a slightly lesser extent, Resistance and Public Loneliness—I’ve felt that satisfaction, and so too with the books I’m proudest of publishing.)

So I had some wonderful family time. BUT, as Marge Simpson says, “Part of spending time together as a family is spending time apart, as individuals.” Billy Lombardo and/or Amy Danzer had invited me (and several other people) to the Green Mill’s Poetry Slam, held on Sundays, right in the heart of prime Father’s Day time. It was a Facebook invite, so it would have been the easiest thing to dodge, and indeed I thought until the very day of that I’d be ignoring it completely, BUT I did want to see both of them, AND I hadn’t read live poetry in quite some time.

And it was fantastic. I was delighted to see Billy and Amy, and they felt the same. (Or feigned it well!) The jazz band bookending and backing up the poetry was alive like Greek fire; the Green Mill was working its magic, which it seems to contain in an inexhaustible reservoir. And Mark Smith called me up early on, and I got to read my favorite fucked-up Father’s Day poem, a poem I wrote almost a decade ago about what was possibly one of the most awkward conversations in human history. I think it went over well as a live reading, and I have no idea how well it will go over as a blog post, but I felt the need to share:

WHAT ISAAC SAID COMING BACK FROM THE MOUNTAIN

Dad, I’m a little concerned

You seem to have a thing for knives!

I know we’ve been provided for

All our lives, Mom and I

We’ve had money, tents and cattle

Plus you slew our foes in battle

You’re a rich man, I shouldn’t bitch

But I’m gonna prattle on for a bit

Why? I’m rattled!

After that shit that just went down

Up on the mountaintop

Stop!

You were ready to burn me!

You bound me up!

I couldn’t speak!

Now it’s my turn, see?

Maybe it was bound to be this way

I wasn’t too sure about Yahweh

Yes, I ignored the Lord your God

But can you blame me?

It seemed odd

All this business with the foreskins

It seemed stranger than the fiction

I thought God was

A lotta buzz about it in our household

I’ve heard about it since I could hear

It happened to me so long ago

You were cutting things before that, though

It’s a bit of an addiction

The wealthy must love weapons

I guess that’s an axiom

Or maybe a rule of thumb

I get it

You get worried

You want to keep people from taking easily

What you worked hard for

You’ve probably had that knife all your life

Still I can’t ignore what else you used it for

I think about it queasily

Did your knife speak to you?

Fill your head with images of what it could do?

If not, what kind of fucked-up vision did God give you?

And how did you tell it to your slaves

Without sounding raving mad, Dad?

I imagine how it all went down

Circumcision

Hopefully with precision

Intense, in tents

Did you pay someone

To hold everyone down?

Or tie them up?

Yup, I bet that was it

Shit

I can’t imagine it

What would I do if someone like you told me I had to do that?

I’d head out

Say “Your loss, boss”

Try to outrun the screams

It seems I can’t begin to comprehend it

Even though it seems you were convinced

It was a great advance in personal hygiene

A permanent covenant cemented

Demented, I say!

But you got everyone to do it your way

(I say there are two types of people in the world: the bleeders and the leaders)

Then again you did it to yourself, too

That helps when you want people to do

Something extreme

And maybe it’s not quite as bad

As this Baal thing, it’s pretty popular

It appalls me

And you, too, want to abolish it

Convert his followers

You say they’re into human sacrifice?

Well, that’s not very nice

Why would a god want that?

Maybe if there were a few of them

And they had to vie for supremacy

One would get hungry

And want to be fed with our dead

But that’s kind of speculatory

(I’m babbling, you see!)

What if there were two gods?

One of love who came before

Then one of war

Who hated creation

A god of negation

Who needed to be sated with gore

Placated with a firstborn so he wouldn’t want more

A tax of sorts

Paid in blood

Tribute to an angry god

You say you abhorred that example

But you figured God wanted a sample

Of that level of devotion

Not a whole life

Just the tip!

Taken off by your knife

You act like this wasn’t your choice

Are you some kind of freak?

Did you really hear a voice?

Was it near?

Did he speak?

Was what he said

Loud enough for you to turn your head?

(How can we know what’s real

For someone else

What they see and hear and feel?)

I know you always tell me

About how mom was supposed to be

Far too old to have a baby

You thought God did that, definitely

But why can’t you see

That that’s less important to me

Than the fact that you cut off part of my body

Without consulting me?

(Yeah, I’m still a little angry.)

I guess my life’s a fact of life to me

I take it for granted, obviously

Whereas you figure it happened miraculously

So that means the same voice can tell you to take it from me

You thought God could take what God had wrought

You led me to this place

With a silent stony face

I trusted you!

We carried wood and fire

Up this hill

Trying to get higher

(Like God needed to see us better)

But when I asked you why

We hadn’t brought anything to kill

You wouldn’t look me in the eye!

That’s when I started feeling ill

You said I should chill

The Lord will provide a sacrifice

But you’d brought cord

I tried to get away

You tackled me, tied me up

For the first time ever, I prayed

Yes, I became a believer today!

Right then

Under the knife’s gleam

When I saw the crazy in your eyes

Turn to calm

It seemed

You saw another prize for God

A ram caught in a thicket

You laughed

You said it all was a trick, a way

For God to know you were true

You figure God was jealous of Baal?

And wanted you to prove you’d be willing to do it all?

Or give up what you most wanted?

Screw you!

That’s not a God I’d look up to

Still I’m haunted, I do think you heard

From someone who wasn’t you

All of the sudden you were talking

About how good is the Lord?

It was absurd

Something happened to turn your heart

And now we’re walking home

Awk-ward!

But it’s a start

I guess

I can’t expect anything less crazy

From the man who invented the bris

Still—hey, don’t get pissed!

I think I better tell mom about this

ANYWAY, whether you are one, or you just have one—happy belated Father’s Day, folks.

Tortoise Books