The Hostage Tells a love story
He pulled the old Technics to the deck
in the rain. Reparation’s an opiate antagonist
for the past, and the act of remembering
another’s pain, acknowledging it? Let’s
call that the last thing we never get to do.
My children, I tell you of my father
because there is no one else to tell
what he told me, and how he told,
other than this poor copy by my hand
that knew there was something wrong,
always wrong – what everyone said was true –
and there is no way to tell you
except this poor copy that enacts
how he set up a warp in his field.
The song I’m playing now is the same song,
always the same song, wrong for the happy
moment, ruining the good, coming
as a feeling that intends metal –
and yet he and I, so desperately in love
while looking down. Selfsame. Why tell?
You must know these things because
he is how anyone can be. You turn up
the music, or sit in the rain with an indoor
stereo and no help that you’ll let near
because who else could understand. I tell
because the practice of monsters is to reconvene
in each generation – and here I mean monstrous
affect, not monstrous people, for he was a man,
he held you too, I even think he loved
holding you – and because I ran away
from home at ten years old with a sudden
dream of you, free. I chased your shapes
past midnight, smiling past the metal.
Even then, you took care of me.
Later, the picture came true: three children,
resisting the camera. Zee in an armoire
with silver-shock hair and arched lip; Kaz
of the joyous laugh, jumping onto the chair;
rounded Aria hugging her sister’s leg.
Listen! For you too will find yourself listening
in the rain soon yourself, with beautiful music.
My father is in the rain and there’s no helping
him. He sat while his concert-sized speakers
blared so the whole street heard his loneliness
sounding theirs. Like you, I just wanted to sleep
in my bed, to make it through a night without
the police investigating a noise complaint
but what’s now called a mental health check
at the behest of neighbors who knew better
than to come near. And if that is fear,
then it is a fear I felt like tonguing metal
on a winter night in New Brunswick.
He screamed for me to come, he screamed
and it’d be worse if I didn’t; I tried to ignore
the sound but it sounded me under the blankets
and I knew it would hurt more, in the end,
if I didn’t walk outside in the rain where
he sat alone and still, as if he had the time
to share all the secrets of being a man.
At that moment, he possessed kingly
knowledge on a plastic throne. He knew
with great contentment, a man reclining
in a deck chair by a crossroads pointing
at Havoc in the distance. Then, children,
he was what I was always, what we were,
what I’d become as his summoned, screamed
extension; the metal tool, the hard implement,
the feeling that prepares the field. But the moment
did not last, which is the structure of the feeling.
He could see I was too small to understand
the holy knowledge, so he kindly sent me back
to the house, out of the rain. Young ones,
if your faces are the lifeline of my free, meaningful future
– I would be dead without you, the metal feeling is a surety –
then his face from that night is the ruin of a memory
I never wanted but had no choice to escape.
He was never understood, for no one possesses
the vocabulary to understand why lives seek gentleness
in the steady rain. Try to explain the need
and you’ll find yourself out in the rain, like he did.
For example: Hey, be with me, I’d think at my lovers,
but they were always with themselves, or with their own
monsters. Was I ever with them? Not as you
were with me, as you are with me. On the deck
in the noise my father was contented in some future
he never knew, and, having done the wrong things
in his past, he weaved music into a cocoon of sound
that couldn’t heal what was never possessed,
but which built a shelter of sorts. I saw all this teaching
in his face in palimpsest but had no vocabulary
either. I have no vocabulary now except one word
I want you to intuit when necessary, my children,
the main word of the metal feeling: Run. I heard the fact,
mostly – I hear the same fact every time
a beautiful voice is directed at anyone,
everyone, and that voice passions out from a singer
who wants to be famous, who seems to care.
Especially a woman singing over a piano
about heartbreak and loss. That’s my father’s sound,
his voice and voices speaking from the deck
in the rain, telling me that love stories
don’t make sense on purpose so that no one will
believe, including the lovers; that the teller
wouldn’t believe before his telling;
that love stories hinge on sudden, doomed
transformation, unable to change back after
the story can’t be fixed, with poor choices
leading to bitter ends, but it’s still love.
This is the feeling, the feeling! The song,
the metal’s whine and thrum. All my father’s
intentionally missed chances to tell the world Thank you
and Sorry and I miss you and I will always help you,
I care for you, I love you, I love you so much
were stories he told by himself in the rain as the police
came with a citation, stories that monsters whispered
in his ear about loveliness and narcotics, all of us powerless
to stop
the song.
The Hostage Tells of Love Story is out of print from The Blasted Tree Store
Featured by The Blasted Tree: September 30, 2020
Shane Neilson
Contributing Author
The Hostage Tells a Love Story by Shane Neilson is a Blasted Tree original poem
Edition of 50 leaflets published in Canada