Orphan
Dylan Balise '23
I. Deficiency
The blood is pooling on level ground,
No one is to my left
Or right.
And I’m not bleeding.
I thought Isaiah would ‘bring justice for the fatherless’ yet
I’m stoned for getting by, and unless they’re here, I reply,
“Pardon my Fraud. I’d get them to do it, but—
wouldn’t the fun be over? Will the game ever end?”
Ode to the DCFS.
Whether or not they chase me down with their
pitchfork and torches / batons and Glocks I think
I’ll always be obsessed with rebuilding
the dysfunctional.
The sun never resists to keep my ruthless cycle alive,
hovering, taunting, unable to clutch me from this
pervasive hell
Of youth.
To look at my shot out here picture everything unseeable
Even gaps in the family portrait—shadowed
Hands on my shoulders.
Even the rain glazing my displaced back runs thicker than
our blood.
II. Withdrawal
The ocean’s on fire perhaps
It’s okay that I never learned
To swim. I’ll drown regardless.
John ‘will not leave you as orphans’ but I must’ve missed
the bus to jail since
Amongst the brick, I’m unchained,
I whisper, “It takes two to tank
my spirit. I need no one. did they get the memo?”
If I could scrub and rinse my DNA, I would.
Let’s throw away possibility’s sliver of something
nuclear.
Hope is the idiotic chance it might change.
You’ve all long been tempted to obsess over something,
well, to contort my hand, shoving it into what
you reckon I need.
But I’m stuck digging at the sod
anyways I have
No intention of burying any hatchet.
Rainy day fund’s long gone––any ways I’ve been stolen
from I pack with flesh and blood.
This doesn’t happen in your idyllic vacuum maybe
you’re all the problem,
all, of it.
III. Lethargy
The dog’s gnawing itself to death outside its
Doghouse: more of a home than I’ve ever had.
A crackhouse doesn’t count.
Peter said ‘be of sober mind’ but didn’t give them their fix
as I’m
Dousing myself in intrusive thoughts, I voice,
“I don’t mean to add fuel to
the filth of you two, but–– how about a few more?”
Take them.
Let’s have a pity party, birthdays are passé.
Not sure what’s worse: the tar of isolation in which I wade,
or the empty that suffocates me to stay afloat.
Its got me thinking to just not, but needy sanity
constantly runs through my cerebral grooves,
expecting too much.
Too much when I forget––choose––to unsmother my too
warm corpse with racing thoughts.
My surname’s still in a noose, I am
An orphan nevertheless.
Cut it, some said that I would never,
the less they feel all the more I do.