The family legend suggested she
was conceived in the mud at
Woodstock during a drug fueled,
hippie daisy chain love-in, any one
of several unknown men could have
donated the fluids fathers are made
from. Not that she had a family,
per se, a mother, for sure, who was prone
to excesses and abuses and was about
as reliable as a crack whore more than
a few years past her best-if-used-by
expiration date. More than likely,
the sex act that produced spawn was
the one that took place on acid,
in a kind of prefab motel room with walls
so thin you could hear the mice breeding
in the neighboring rooms. No wonder
the daughter was a series of acronyms
no one bothered to diagnose, up the chute
at fifteen, and long gone to parts unknown
and presumed dead, not long after she
began to show. Ended up in some place
that was worse than hell, a suburb where
all the plastic, status seeking people
went to die and once settled there,
even dead, you still had to earn a living.
Her daughter was about as adorable
and adoptable as one of those human science
experiments gone bad in made for second
reels at drive-in movies no one watched
except in between the acts coming up for air
or to light another joint. By her mid-teens
she had a list of priors longer than the veil
of tears track marks on her arms, her brain
a sieve all the dormant, dying cells slipped
through, only leaving behind habits of
a lifetime, a bloodline, that cannot be broken.
Alan Catlin is a widely published poet in the US of A and elsewhere. His most recent book is “Books of the Dead: a memoir with poetry” about the deaths of his parents. He is a retired professional barman and the editor of the online poetry zine misfitmagazine.net.
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