My dad was an alcoholic,
mom, a disciplinarian,
my older brother, a sadist,
who rejected me from the age of three,
along with our cousin, Arthur,
whom we met in Huntington Beach,
after I turned five and Terence turned nine,
they became torture incorporated,
a dynamic duo, no fun, assholes,
my mom and dad were a united front,
no playing one off the other,
bloody Roman Catholic Church people,
they'd been duped for roughly 500 years,
Walter and Doris brought us up
in this post-Goan Inquisition mess,
they drank feni on special occasions,
wretched tasting cashew liquor,
laughed and celebrated being Goan,
Indians held under the thumb
of Portuguese rule for ages,
but mom and dad grew up in Nairobi,
where they danced at the Gymkhana,
drinking was obligatory,
perhaps to forget past misdeeds,
or to remember them and laugh, who knows,
my Auntie Gertie and Uncle Ellie,
Arthur's parents, lived in Huntington Beach,
that's how my family ended up
moving there, after my dad got a job
with Flying Tigers, a cargo airline,
back in 1975, after he left Air India
where he was a Flight Controller,
we moved from Kew Gardens, New York City,
to grow up in Huntington Beach,
if you can call it that, stunted education,
I became blunted on reality,
by the time I was in college,
I was slowly losing my mind,
maybe it was the hallucinogens,
or maybe it was simply genetics,
or the stress of being the son
of immigrants made me finally leave
after I had turned twenty-one, black jack,
and finished college in Memphis
after I figured out how to focus
on my studies again, I wasn't smart,
neither socially, nor worldly, money
was of little interest for me,
for my brother, the stock broker,
and later, a financier, he lived for the numbers,
we couldn't be more different as adults,
he remained in Cali and there he thrived,
while I moved to Chicago on a whim,
after college, I got married and left
Memphis and Southerners for good,
found the route to big city life
appealing as a bookseller, but books
were no longer valued by most people,
bookstores went out of business, or bankrupt,
since online shopping killed the industry,
I got a job at a nightclub four years ago,
part-time, never enough to make ends meet,
I turned fifty last week, no retirement savings,
this is it, life in a nutshell, I run
since I suffer from depression,
and meditate to figure out how to focus
on my breath without controlling
my breathing, not an easy task,
sometimes I wish I had never been born,
a failure at everything I started,
second born, the baby of the family,
rejected from the start for my brother,
the original Rolex Oyster boy,
I was chopped liver, rotten, fermented,
only a playful Serbian would eat,
what is the point in suffering people,
as a child, I had little choice, quiet
and shy, I had a lot to overcome,
it took decades, now I couldn't care less,
with no children, no progeny, I have
no one to care for me in my old age,
I burned all my bridges to my family
after dad died nearly six years ago,
I became the ghost of the clam,
the mussel shell I threw at the pillar
beneath the pier back in 1976,
my cousin Arthur tortured me
with that phrase, the ghost of the clam,
what a fucking sadistic idiot,
some people might find it funny,
but then again, I find revenge funny,
a little schadenfreude for the world,
I release this dark force on my family,
they who tortured me with their games,
this spell cannot be uncast, I let go...
