To The Kid Shooting Down From The Stars.

Hey, bud. You'll be here soon. Here's a little list I made up, you know, to read on the flight. I love ya.

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A Mom's love, my own anger. Water gushing up my nose. Getting stung by yellowjackets by the tomato plants. My brother slicing open his tongue on a sled blade. My brother getting bashed in the face by an aluminum bat. Kissing a great girl who smelled like cake. My Mom-Mom's love. Getting pepper-sprayed in the eyes. Backing into a dipshit's car in the high school parking lot. The joy of hitting a RBI double. Becoming hooked on sleeping with a vaporizer until it gummed up the finish on the  bunk beds. Standing in line for George Thorogood tickets in the 15 degree pre-dawn darkness. And running from black bear cubs on a trail in the spring forest. And stalactite welts on the roof of my mouth from pizza and impatience.

Someone splitting my head open from behind with a tossed cinder block. Finding my cat smooshed out on 9th Avenue. Kissing a great girl who tasted like Jager. Slowly forgetting what my Dad's voice sounded like. My mom crying/her nose all swollen and red and runny. Fresh bluefish scales all over our back sidewalk. Dogs. A baby chicken in a cardboard box under a lightbulb out on the porch. Knowing I wasn't ever gonna hit any homeruns even before the pitcher threw the ball. Playing the guitar. Playing the guitar on my back on the floor. Playing the harmonica. Playing the harmonica on my back on the floor in a puddle of spilt drinks. Looking at a lily pad on a Mississippi pond and throwing my buzzbait at it and watching the bass erupt. Getting seven teeth pulled at once/passing out in the dentist's parking lot. My Pop-Pop's love. Firing bullets into the slate sky at the end of the day when I didn't care anymore if there were any deer around or not. And meeting an airline stewardess in Chicago and going back to her place somewhere in her city.

Marrying your Mom on a gorgeous October evening. Red Lobster with her two hours later. The flashing cop lights out on Fayette Street when people got hit by cars. Walking around London by myself and happy about it. Trafalgar Square with your Uncle Dave and the pigeons. Pigeons all over your Mom's arm in Venice. My Pop-Pop saying 'nigger' like it was any old word. My Pop-Pop limping up to the streams he drove me to: to see if I caught any trout. Standing on top of the Empire State Building in a thick fog. Violet, your sister. The happiness your sister taught me. And all the happiness you're gonna teach me too, man.

Throwing a chip of rock into Walden Pond. Recording records in a sweltering garage. Inhaling (I inhaled). Watching the magical purple sunset over a west Texas motel parking lot. Getting hoagies and cheesesteaks at the deli with my paper route money. Our first VCR. Video tape spilling out of the VCR/the horrible hissing sound it made. My mom buying me books whenever I asked her too. Charles Dickens. Drinking moonshine with the writer Larry Brown at a house party. Your Uncle Dave beating everyone in the room at arm wrestling til there was no one left. Standing outside the gates of Graceland because it was too expensive for us to go in. Walking right past the ticket counter at The Norman Rockwell Museum and going in without paying. Emily Dickinson's bedroom/ the chest where she hid her poems away. Containers of live rattlesnakes in the back of a Texas liquor store. Pasta in Rome. And looking at the lights of Mexico from an El Paso highway.

Holding your Mom's hand as your sister was born. Throwing tennis balls into rough streams for the dogs. Eating a raw habenero and leaving work early. Getting hit, by men and women. Reading books on hotel bathroom floors. Signing people's yearbooks and never ever seeing them again. German rain. German pilsners. Whispering to my Mom-Mom an hour before she passed. Roller skating at Radnor Rolls. Asking the girl from Spencer's Gifts for a New Year's Eve date to go see my brother's band, Marah, and her saying no. Joining Marah over pitchers of Honey Brown on Spring Garden Street. Making friends/ letting them go. Making memories/ keeping them forever. Looking up at the stars from a rowboat on the Chesapeake Bay at four-thirty am. And playing air drums to entire live Genesis records until I gave myself goosebumps.

Cooking Thai stir-fry for your Mom in Philly. Watching my Pop-Pop's brown junker disappear around the corner. Christmas trees in all their forgotten December glory. Trees out on the January curb. A little piece of holiday tinsel in the front flower bed in July. Standing in the flooding river in Wales. French truckstops. The bored tired eyes of the French truckstop counter girl. Calling your mom from a billion miles away. Riiiiiiiiiiiiing. Riiiiiiiiiiiing. Riiiiiiiiiing.

And never forgetting the lonliness of the ringing when you just can't wait for the pick up.

And smelling pancakes cooking while I was still in bed.

And jerkoff Pete Rose rolling an autographed ball across the table at me without even a glance my way.

Adults screaming at each other.

The first notes of Backstreets rising up out of the humid night.

People waiting at Arrivals, nervous.

Me and your Mom and Violet and the dogs: waiting.

Off A Pigeon Shit Ledge Together.

Two years ago today, we put the duffel bag on the bed and started chucking stuff in it; stuff we thought we'd want. I put the phone chargers in, and my toothbrush. Monica threw in a Chapstick and the camera. I chucked in a Dickens novel. She tossed in some make-up and some shampoo and some toothpaste. I put in my secret flask with red wine in it and my Zoloft. Monica laid in some pjs, some warm socks. I took out the flask and dumped the wine down the drain. My wife threw a thing of granola bars in there. Maybe some cookies. I picked out a shirt or two, I guess. Maybe she packed them for me.

At the hospital we watched the tv a little. We saw the playbacks of the new President being inaugurated on every channel they had in there. He was someone we really love and so we saw it as a cool sign; it seemed really something to us that we would probably have our first kid on the first day of a good man's era. It put a little extra zip in the air of our room. It got us kinda stoned on hope and the future. It was just great.

Nurses popped in and out. I ate cookies and walked around some. Down to the cafeteria, looking at the menus stapled to the cork boards. It was Ethnic Week and there were days listed when they were gonna be serving Chow Mein and Lasagna and stuff. Dinner was over by the time I wandered in though, so I just poked around and bought some more cookies for something to do. In the hallways, I strolled down brighly lit tiles and tried to imagine how my life was about to change.

You can't imagine it though.

You just can't.

I'd been in a rock-n-roll band for over a decade, driving around, playing guitars and drinking late into the night. I'd spent a lot of years doing something wild and free; but down in my guts I was never feeling like this was my world. It was a pretend world: a place where men could pretend to be kids. And after awhile, that got really old and stale. The songs, the musicians in the band, the endless nights in London or Austin, I began to look down at them as if they were a fat rubber-banded wad of old football pool slips; things that had once held so much meaning/so much jittery excitement; things that were now just stuffed into the sock drawer, taking up space I needed.

Life doesn't ever end up how you planned it. Nothing comes rumbling down the pike with the same paint job it was wearing in your 3am dreams. So here I was, severed from my past/ kicking around the halogen halls, waiting on my future; our future.

I ambled back into our room after awhile and had a cookie and asked Monica if she wanted one. She didn't and I was secretly glad because that's the way I think. I got a Cookie Monster mentality and here I am about to become a dad. Whatever. I'd find my way.

It's sort of otherworldly in a way to watch the person you love the most in this world lying in a hospital bed. You sit there on an orange cushioned chair by the window that looks out into the darkness of night and across the air into the slanted glow of other people's hospital rooms, you sit there and you steal peaks at the person, at the tubes in her arms, and you notice stuff you never really bothered to see before. Pin dot freckles on the underside of her pale wrist.

The way her ears attach to her temples.

How she smiles a little without even knowing it when she watches the television, even during the commercials; even during the dumb ones for cars or other stuff we ain't buying.

It throws you for a loop but it isn't a forever loop and sadly it usually slips away when you slide down through the automatic  hospital doors. By the time you get home and park the rig and help the person inside: you're already thinking dumbass selfish shit, like what can I have for dinner/we're out of everything or I wonder if its okay if I just sit on the couch to chill and watch some Seinfeld. Still, it can come back on you, like it's coming back on me today. Watching the person just laying there on the hospital sheets, flipping channels, their heart beats doing electric dances across the monitor over in the corner. It comes back sometimes and you are thumped with a sledgehammer across your facebone. It comes back and for a second you understand everything. Serge, you dumb bastard...look at all this, man.

There were some needles and medicines that Monica had to have to get stuff moving along. Needles for pain too. I kept thinking maybe someone would offer me a needle, just so it might make her feel a little better, like she wasn't all alone with that stuff. Nobody ever offered me anything though.

At some point, between nurses whisper talking to Monica about dilating this and that, I fell asleep on the plastic couch. When I woke up, I peeled my face off the vinyl and rubbed the sand from eyes and I could tell right away we were closer to the new world.

You could just feel it. The coast of life.

You could just barely see the rocky shore getting banged by the waves. From a misty mile out, you could just barely see the jutting cliffs of land hanging high above some beach we'd never seen before in our lives.

I rolled off the couch and looked over at Monica and she was smiling a light smile as the nurses busied themselves clearing a landing strip. In my deepening breaths I let go of everything I had ever known like fresh ballons on a wind. I looked out the window at the gauzy January morning and I saw the mountains over the city and the sky up over the mountains. I turned around slowly, and walked over to her bed.

We looked at each other.

We nodded spy nods.

And when the nurses weren't looking, we grabbed each other's hands and we leaped off yesterday's pigeon shit ledge togther.

The Bumblin' Fumblin' Prime Time False Poet Blues.

There are little signs in life that I don't know if they're true or not: little butterflies that butterfly by you just when you were thinking some random-ass memory about your dead Mom-Mom: convincing you that your Mom-Mom is now a butterfly who happens to live in the bushes and shits and eats, not say, in a Vietnamese jungle or some Kansas sunflower field, but right outside your house. And I'm not gonna lie to ya: it takes balls to even dally with the notion that your Mom-Mom is a reincarnated bug that happens to show up to flit around on the breeze when you're taking a fat bag of trash out to the garbage can.

Whatever. 

I'm the type that likes to play that game, to find myself staring down the barrel of a sign from the great beyond here, a little reminder from a parallel dimension there. It makes me feel like my imagination still has a few miles in it; that I still got Poetry Eyeballs, like a kid or an old dreamer who never leaked out all his magic sap. Don't get me wrong: its all ego. Anytime you spend thinking about how wildly creative you are in this life is basically just you being an asshole. And the punishment for that is probably that some of your creative juice leaks into your piss and you piss it away, little by little. Poets who call themselves poets are basically people running out of ideas.

Still. I have these moments when I get all giddy thinking about my super powers; how I can recognize the subtle secret signs my dead relatives send me; how I can sniff out the very light fragrance of life's essence, it's magical lyricism. I get off on feeling like some common moment has way deeper meaning than it has any right to and that I detect that. Hmph. I know, I know. What a douche bubble.

Now you catch my drift, my dilemma. I am a Sign See-er. A Reader of Moments. The Periscope: that's what they call me in some circles (no circles).  It's a hard way to live and its a racket too. But I lie to myself like a motherfucker: and I stare at my daughter's face while she's watching the Yo Gabba Gabba dude blow her mind with his orange magnificence and I think that I see my Pop-Pop staring at me through her profile. Or that I can really just bask in the badassness of my kid just flinging her arms out in spastic joy and recognize that it really is the greatest moment of my life: unfolding right then and fucking there, on the living room carpet of a rented house at five-nineteen in the evening.

It's a balm, I tell ya. A soothing agent. It's warm whiskey: to buy your own bullshit. And the buzz never dies.

So, what happened the other night was tough to take.

I gave Violet her bath, like always. I did the routine, I let her soak her ass in the three inches of lukewarm with her Dora bobber and her colored boats and her plastic dinosaurs while I set out her Penguin pj's and a diaper. I put the binky on the bookcase by the stereo. I hit the stereo to the very first note of the first song (Ladysmith Black Mambazo!) on the record she falls asleep to everynight and paused it right at the exact second it begins. You know you're a legendary bitch when you know a record so inside/out that you understand, completely, the very spaces between the music, between the songs. So, yeah, I did that.

I killed the Winnie The Pooh lamp so the room was only lit by the nightlight on the bookshelf. Everything was ready, man. Ready for that quickness that must shine when you're putting the kid to sleep. One fumble/one pause/one little chunk in the super-slick grease of tucking her in and the whole thing can just explode on you with unforgivable energy. Let her tap her head on the headboard or drop the bink down the side of the mattress where you can't find it for a sec and you might as well have leaned down into her drifting sleepy eyes and touched her nose-to-nose and let out one of those blood-curdling Middle Eastern Street Fighting Yelps you sometimes hear in the dusty background on CNN.

Everything was set. It was Go Time. I went in there and rubbed some soap on her and whispered at her like I read in some parenting book once, so my voice helps to lull her toward La-La Land. I whispered and let warm water roll down her neck and back and she was tiring of her toys and I could feel that I was casting deep spells on her desire to never sleep again for as long as her daddy lives so he can't have his half hour at the end of the massive day to unwind with a Diet Coke and some sitcom.  I lifted her out of the tub, dripping, onto her beach towel unfolded in my lap. Together, we said our "see ya tomorrows" to the boats and the T-rexes.

I carried her to her room.

We did our ballet.

To the stereo, hit the Pause, pick up the binky, put it to her lips, spin the half spin of grace, to the bedside, settle her down onto the softness (onto the diaper on top of the pj's ontop of her bed with the blanket folded back so it's easy to flip right up on her).

One of my moments started to come to me. I thought I smelled greatness. The greatness of a man, in the American night, laying his beloved daughter to sleep in the bed he bought her with the money he made working with his hands. Something so pure. Something...poetic.

I zipped up her pj's, the music overtaking us both. The deep rich voices of ancient Africa chanting and singing in such harmony.

My God. I was drunk on our love, on our little poetic scene playing out.

I moved to the door to leave like I do every night, waiting to hear her sweet little voice, like it comes every night.

There!

"Byyyyyyyye," she says through her binky popping at her lips. "Byyyyyyyye," and get this: she raises her little left hand and waves from under her covers: a tiny hand saying goodbye. A tiny voice saying Bye.

Oh the humanity. The sweet bittersweet wonderful terrible world spinning a thousand miles per second under my feet, under our feet. The clouds mixed with moonbeams high above our heads, the thin veneer of night all that lies between this heaving ball of life and forever after.

"Byyyyyyyye," she whimpered.

"Byyyyyyye sweetheart," I whimpered back.

I pulled the door shut, slowly, like The Walton's lights going out.

"Byyyyyyye," I heard her from beyond the door. One last proverbial kiss to her daddy.

The door wouldn't shut.

"Byyyyyyyyye." She was still good-byeing me.

I pulled hard, risking the slam, needing to preserve the stardusted momement. MY moment.

It didn't shut. What the fuck!

I started getting a little antsy.

"Byyyyyyyye." Christ, she knows I'm still here. Still standing at the door, like a fat clueless ass clown.

I didn't answer her. My last bye had been long and lingering and had faded just as I pulled the door to close, like in a killer scene ending in a play. I'd nailed it and I knew it and I didn't want to mess with that.

I shook the door a little. Nothing. It was stuck on something. Goddamnit. Godfuckingdamnit CLOSE YOU FUCKING STUPID DOOR...YOU STUPID IDIOTIC PIECE OF SHIT CHEAPEST ASSHOLE DOOR AT LOWE'S THAT MY ASSHOLE LANDLORD PROBABLY PAID SIX DOLLARS FOR...FUCKING CLOSE!

"Byyyyyyye." An angel becoming confused. Why won't that daddy go now?

I looked up. The door was caught on one of the dumb over the top hanger things I'd put up for her coats.

Shit. I pulled again, with a lot of yank. Nothing.

"Byyyyyyye." Poor baby. Oh, for the Love of Mary why is this happening  right now? I just wanna eat some chips and salsa and watch some damn King of Queens or Bizarre Foods.

I pushed the door in a little, thinking that was it. Violet would be sucked back down to Earth from the Drifting Cloud of Impending Dreams and she would be mighty razzled about that and I'd end up having to get some freaking apple juice and all kinds of shit.

A line of light shot in her room, but all I heard was bye. Again. "Byyyyyyyye."

I jimmied with the hanger thing and pulled the door again and this time I heard it click and felt it's certain pop of closure.

The moment, my poetic moment was toast.

I stood there in my splendid shame. Utter chaos had risen up in me, born of nothing. I felt like a dick. I was a dick. You don't just drip drops of poetry down on your eveing whenever the hell you feel like it, fuckface. You're not allowed to do that.

The signs have to be real. Natural. Unexpected. And sly.

"Byyyyyyyyye."

No lie.

She said it again. As I was just standing there. I heard it cut through the music, through the wood of the door.

And without trying or even giving a shit: my kid became the greatest poet alive tonight.