Devlin De La Chapa- Two Poems

 

Seven Splinters on Saturday

 

My son is 12.

 

Saturday morning
feeding the dog
mowing the lawn
edging the curves
trimming the
bougainvillea
tossing debris
into the janitor grade trash can

 

the sun
is burrowing down on his back,
but he doesn’t complain.
he moves a board leaned up
against the fence for the passed week
and seven splinters prick themselves
into the left of his mid-size palm

 

he comes inside
asks for tweezers
fifteen minutes later
he’s still removing splinters
particularly a big one
which tends to grow stubborn
by remaining in place

 

a bout of frustration
creases between my son’s
large brown eyes
then he looks at me and says:
‘May I say a bad word?’
I nod my head, ‘Yes’.

 

‘This is a bitch!’

 

thank heaven for boys.

 

 

 

GoldFish

I woke up one morning
to an empty place with
an abundance of space
for the life of me I could not fill. 

 

So these walls suddenly became
the material, the immaterial
the existent, the non-existent;
I was buried within.

 

Yet, no one knew or cared
to consider me lost
no flyers, no milk cartons, no billboards
not a trace of my importance existed.

 

I was dead

 

Or was I?

 

This is how it starts:

 

She yells, you yell.
She threatens to leave, you leave.
She takes the dog, you take the cat.
She calls a lawyer, you represent yourself.

 

Then, the dog runs away with the cat
‘cause it considered you two morons.
And her lawyer screws the hell out of you
because you like screwing women.

 

And that’s how it ends.

 

Now back to these walls.

 

I’m alive again.

 

My space needs a woman’s touch
then I remembered, ‘No it doesn’t,
it needs a man’s touch, goddamnit!’
so I leave these walls blank.

 

I take a ride out to IKEA
since every single divorced man tends to shop there
sorting through colors, patterns, lamps,
things square and oval and all around boring.

 

But after two hours of trying to recover things lost,
things I care not to buy, I say ‘Fuck it!’
and storm out the store to the store next door
and buy what every man should buy after a divorce:

 

A goldfish.

 

DEVLIN DE LA CHAPA has been featured in Mademoiselle, Fangoria, Bloodlines, Orion Headless, The Camel Saloon, The Rainbow Rose, Catfishgringoriver, PostCard Shorts, The Carnage Conservatory, Black-Listed Magazine, and is scheduled to appear in Horror Sleaze Trash, Daily Love, Weirdyear, Drunken Absurdity, and Raven Images.  She was recently awarded Editors Choice at The Camel Saloon.  Devlin edits at http://boyslut.wordpress.com.