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In that darkness,

Speakers rose like

Housing projects,

Moonlight diamonded

Mesh-wire panes.

What was it that bloomed

Around his curled

Body when the lights

Came up, fluorescent,

Vacant, garish?

The gym throbbed

With beats & rage

And his eyes darted

Like a man nailed

To a burning crucifix.

Our father comes in wearing his gorilla mask and hands, swinging his arms and beating his chest. My sister puts her hands over her plate. Our father pushes her hands away, grabs at her food and pokes sauerkraut through the mouth hole in his mask. He moves around the table, swiping food from the paper plates and guzzling from the cups. Near my mother he bangs his head on the knickknack shelf and one of the snow globes falls and breaks on the floor. It’s the one with the satellite inside.

When our father comes near me, I slide down under the table, but he pulls me back up by his hairy rubber hands. I don’t say anything. He likes being the gorilla. After dinner, when he takes off the mask and hands, his face will be flushed and there will be tears in his eyes.

1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.

2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.

3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.

4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.

5. Stay

6. Alive.

MR. GREEN: Two verbs! Granted, they are irregular. But that’s no excuse, for these forms —

Do. Not. Change.

They are immutable!

More reliable than the people in your lives. More stable than governments. More dependable than churches or philosophies. These verbs are your deliverance!

Commit these patterns to memory. Determine the person, the number, the tense. Then remember the form. That’s all there is. To conjugation.

Conjugation. Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful act. 

Unlike the other countries, this one

Begins in houses, specific houses and the upstairs room

Where constitutions vibrate in the blockfront drawers,

A Queen Anne highboy, or maybe the widow’s walk

On a farmhouse hundreds of miles inland and believed

By the family to be a lookout for Indians though clearly

It was a pioneer’s conceit, fresh as the latest politics

From home: so much for that innocent thesis The Frontier.

“Do you masturbate?” he pried.

“Only alone, by myself.” I felt him bristle at my insolence.

“Do you work with appropriate fantasies?”

“Work?”

“You know, do you masturbate to appropriate fantasies before indulging in your inappropriate ones?” He’d given me very specific instructions about this. He scolded my silence by scooting his chair forward till I could smell the odor of his leg.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I forget.”

THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.