Ducks on the Lake

a poem for Dr. David Lavery, zeitgeist scholar & very important MTSU writer/teacher. I’m forever grateful that he let me attend his classes even though I never registered early enough to get an actual spot.

The first time I went to a strip club, it was with a group of god-hungry academics at 10 am on a Sunday.
It was The Bing
from the Sopranos
& we were there for a fan experience.

It smelled like a locker room,
worn shoes.
The tits flashed like light bulbs.

Even the not so crusty profs had beers & became vacation smokers that morning.
I wondered what would happen when we left.

We went out back to see where Ralphie beat a pregnant stripper’s head into an interstate guard rail because she was pregnant with his kid.
At the diner where Tony faded to black like so many of his favorite classic rock songs,
they gave us all bags of onion rings to take on the bus back to New York from wherever in the hell we were in New Jersey

II.

My love for Tony Soprano is the easiest way to talk about and contain one of the major sicknesses in my life.

These days I don’t think of him fondly.
My summer Sopranos rewatch bender plans don’t even sound fun.
There’s not enough Miller Lite in the world to make any of that enjoyable again.
Those narratives have worn themselves out on me & the un-stylized bigotry hasn’t aged well.

Tony was a father I could fuck,
a goddamn disaster of a provider
who could pick me up, if he had to.

Let’s all be glad I can name that.
If I’m going to be abused, I’d rather it be stylized
There’s comfort in the container
of only being known as a performance.

Tony is part of my therapeutic process,
a beast I never thought would be satiated so it’s good that I developed a language to understand what it was doing when it was standing in for human connection

Let’s let him go in our blood-warm pool of reparenting
I won’t be sad when those ducks fly.

They were never meant to live in a suburban pool, you sadistic mother-hungry psychopath.