SONGS OF THE SUN AMOR

WADE STEVENSON

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York

Songs of the Sun Amor
by Wade Stevenson
Copyright © 2019

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in
reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover photo: courtesy of Annawade Stevenson

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-341-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930791

BlazeVOX [books]
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Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org

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ABOUT MY MOTHER

When I was born my blue-blood mother

Quickly had my WS initials engraved

On a Tiffany silver spoon.

Years later, when I came of age,

In a rebellious rage, I took that spoon

Into my room, twisted it

Laughing out loud as it met its doom.

My crippled mother couldn’t drive

She hung out on her bed

Arms too weak to push a wheelchair

At night, bathed, scrubbed, pyjamaed,

A British nanny led us to her bedroom suite

Where, propped between the finest sheets,

My Mommy lay in fragile splendor

Remembering how it was to walk

Not knowing how to love

Polio-paralyzed, helpless, on her back

Her honey hair haloed on the pillow

She said she wished one day to ride a horse

One kiss on each cheek, a brief good night

A dream of a black stallion thundering on the shore

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A year later she tumbled down the stairs

My nanny had me on the potty near the bath

I hear her cry, I hear her fall

Her shriek, as I sit paralyzed by the spill

She died on a hot summer day

I took my bike and rode it hard downhill

The wheels of a truck almost put an end to my life

The silver spoon will never unbend itself

The beauty of grief is it helps survive the pain

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THE MAP OF ELSEWHERE

My mother sat on a wheelchair, she couldn’t move

Enthroned in the silent royalty of immobility

When she had to go to the bathroom she rang a bell

She had no use for lullabies or her baby son’s needs

She let me sleep with her for awhile until I slept alone

No room for us both in the conjugal bed!

Many nights, before slipping into slumber, I would lie

Wondering what kind of a woman this mother was

No mother to me, a mother in name, never caught in the act

Of embracing or feel, no wonder all my early wounds

Took so long to heal, her paralyzed life haunted

By an overwhelming fear of falling down the stairs

There’s not much I felt I could ever say to my mother

Couldn’t tell her how much I wanted to try out sex with another

My longing was such it didn’t matter if it was woman or man

Then my father got mad, venting his fury —

I ran from that house and never returned

I discovered love in strange places

Real Amor was on the map of elsewhere

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THE MANSION OF YOUR MIND

Open the door to the past

Remembrances stir, hard to define

Try to shut it

Once opened, you never will

All the wild moments lived spill

Out helter-skelter, fill multiple

Rooms in the mansion of your mind

At night you roam the halls, a ghost

Seeking the one real Amor dwells in

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SO CLOSE, SO FAR

There was always the coming, the going,

The leaving, the lying

Then the long sad sound of her crying

How many times we tried to turn it around

It turned out the love we wanted was not to be found

My woman wanted closeness

I needed distance in love

I couldn’t accept her closeness

She couldn’t bridge my distances

The sex we had was a balancing point between

To be close and yet far, to be far and yet close

I wonder why we waited so long

To find out that what we each wanted

Was the fulfillment of some mismatched dream

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KISS ONE GIRL

Kiss one girl, you’ve kissed them all

But you can never kiss all the girls

So be happy with the special one

Who first allowed you a profound

Long lasting post-midnight kiss

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MIRROR MAN

When my friends said

“You’re the mirror of your mother”

I wanted to tell them

“I’m the bastard of my father.”

Yes, I was the mad monkey in the mirror

I pissed off all my mother’s admirers

Then I spit on the spot that marked

My absent father’s tomb

There’s nothing like a young man’s rage

To fulfill a karmic sense of death or doom

Lucky miracle, thanks to a moon woman

I found a long, hard way to come back

I hailed the last bus from nowhere

I learned to listen to the wind, to hear

The wailing of the white wolves, to wait

For the promise of a life reborn

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MY FLY AWAY LOVER

My fly away lover, I thought you were goddess

Until you demonstrated

By leaving

I was destined to love someone else

On that blackest of nights I went to the airport

To watch the coming and goings of the planes

The red sky streaked with jet exhaust

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ABOVE AND BELOW

Horseman, pass by

When the disaster happens

You’ll have the courage to ride it out

Follow the bliss of your heart

Gallop down the path

That leads to the ecstatic of the moon

Don’t worry about flying too high

Earth’s gravity will pull you down

Pacing yourself, reining in, letting go,

Until one day you find that measured space

Between the sky above, the earth below

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INCUBUS BABY

Demon-dreamed, born of no one

Son of a shattered mother,

My tiny bones in her stricken body,

And a never-there far-flung father,

Incubus baby,

I came into the light screaming

Balled fists, feet already burning,

I never wanted this birth to repeat

My British nanny prophesied

I’d be dead before I even got to ten

Keyless, hunkered down in a nursery room

I cursed my proud parent’s intercourse

Then I grew, of course, of course,

Plenty of time to ponder my inscrutable loss

Soon as I could move in my stolen sneaks

I sneaked out, running, never glanced back

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QUESTION OF PAIN

Is

It

True

You

Don’t

Know

Pain

Until

Your

Body

Bleeds?

Or

Is

It

The

Heart

That

Actually

Starts

It?

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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NIGHT

On the other side of the night there’s an illumined space

Where spirits from the empire of the dead luxuriate

They smoke and dream, remembering moments of love and fire

You can hear the phantoms murmuring about time

And all its troubles. They never die, those ghosts

Of the past, they keep rising in columns, or pushing up

Dandelion weeds, through the ground of the ever-present.

So make it in this moment or risk being dragged into the flow

Of all those days gone by, each hour building another wall

Separating you from ripples of longing and regret.

Soon you, too, will belong to the undying kingdom of the dead

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BIO POEM

Here is a brief biography

Written in the mind’s tortured geography

Digging deep in the body’s topography

Find an example of weird graphology

In rage of anguish, mood of monotony

Because there is no choreography

In a wheelchair cosmology

Here and there sparks a flash of beauty

A hint of a passing pageantry

Perhaps a glimpse of poetry

Then darkness comes, no entry

The end has no beginning

And the beginning has no end

The sand flows down and you go on saying “and”,

Linking past to future with a simple ampersand

Ghost floating through the hourglass of your life

Longing to break the glass, rise in the air, free

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RUN BUT DON’T FORGET

Run till you can no longer run,

Run with the bulls, run to the hills

Holler how hard it is

To escape the facts of the flesh

How easy to collapse

A beautiful life

Into instant death

Never forget the wise woman who welcomed

You when alone in an opioid wilderness

You wept, waited, wondered

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