ROBERT NAZARENE
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Waiting for An(y) Acceptance

I.           If Anybody Knows Something I Don’t Know...


It was only fifteen weeks
—that seemed like fifty years. A dry spell, as in: Mojave, Sahara,
Death Valley. Waiting, waiting...like the man on the corner
of Michigan & Oak in Chicago, the guy with his pant legs
pinned up behind his coveralls, waiting for somebody to roll along
with some spare change. Waiting. At Michigan & Oak. In Chicago,
across from The Ritz,
for Christ’s
sake, sitting on that platform with the four rollers,
supporting

what was left of his weight.



II.           Know: If Anybody Knows Something I Don’t...

I’ve got a knack for hiding my feelings
& calling it art. Perhaps it was just that these editors,
these idioters, were hiding
their feelings
of unspeakable admiration, their glee at my having considered their puny
     little...
as a home for my: art.         The countdown to acceptance

was getting a little ten, nine, eight, seven, six,
seven, seven, six, eight,
ragged.

Good things run
from those who wait.



III.           If I Don’t Know Something Anybody Knows...


just shout it right out. The French have a word for it:
I couldn’t begin to guess
what it is. I didn’t go to Harvard.
But I did go to high school where they had a vote senior year:
Best This, Best That, Best...I won “Best Dressed”
because I wore clothes that had all the right labels:
Drunk, Nut-case, Liar, Fag. Only they were invisible,
like me. Here’s where you can say: I don’t believe a fucking
word of this.



IV.           I Don’t Know
                Anything. Ask Dad.


Think what it must have been like:
to have a know-it-all
for a son.

     Funny.

My father never once
hugged me
or told me he hated me.

I guess he thought
I knew.
Perhaps,
I was unable to write the unreadable pain.

                  All the years,

I couldn’t wait to show my dad what I’d written,
what I’d created to gain his approval. I’d have waited
forever

if I had to: chained to a man on a platform,
at Michigan & Oak, in Chicago,
in a pouring rain:

to erase the sound of the doctor’s diagnosis,
to erase the click & clack
of the walker, confining him to the home where he lived, alone.
To erase his desperate conversion
to Catholicism, to liquid morphine,

to those voices
coming from nowhere,
everywhere,
to prayer—

to death, to   acceptance.



V.           3 A.M., November 16, 2004


Father,


I wish you all the best.
I hope we’ll meet again.
In a cold, Chicago
night.