Citizens Band Radio

Breaker breaker, anyone there, these feelings have nowhere else to go.

You never really know why their apocalypse has been hand-lettered,

what Kubrick-directed conspiracy contrailed their last grassy knoll,

who, lost in the crossroads of corn, crucified these warnings plank by plank—

but it’s always my dad, jackknifed, smoking over Folger’s Crystals, mad.

A mirage is a real mirage; a bump in the night’s still a real bump.

Fold small bill denominations into a Twin Tower prophecy. 

Remember gritty hidden pictures on the Camel cigarette pack?

It’s my old man, not dead, doing the twist with the Yagi antenna

and me, wrong, yelling over snow which way to go to get to the truth

bracing for the lies not knowing it’s practice for the rest of my life.

You practice bracing for the deception; it’s not that I’m mad, Houston,

you just never get over it, it’s inside you, like love, or fluoride. 

The body of childhood I never recovered. Over and out.