________________
The Oedipus Curse
(M.R.’s Hang-up/or,
Neuroses)
________________
M.R., he
was like a plume cracked open—
A hawk on
fire!
In the
whack of the wind, he told me one afternoon
((I was
just a kid of fifteen, knew him since I was ten) (he to, a good Catholic boy
two years younger))
He had
made whoopee, like Oedipus with his mother!
I
thought, “Why’s he telling me this?
Is he
wrapped in some internal strife, some entangling hedges,” I told
my mind’s eye; today I’d call it, Neuroses.
Or
perhaps that’s what he has now, not then.
Was he
choked up with gull bird hair?
And
needed to get it out?
There was
only one place to get to, and that was far away from him.
Yet I
thought I knew him infinitely.
Thereafter
our paths narrowed to a hollow.
It has been
fifty-years, a half-cemetery, and my mind asks, why?
Can such
behavior, attained comfort?
Is it
some abstract obsession?
Why I’ll
never know.
But why
he told me, I presuppose is that it was the last limit of imaginable horror a
person can commit!
And for
some reason I was his priest, and he sought absolution, for I made no
condemnation.
#5153 (4-19
thru 21 April, 2016)
Note: The ideas of such incest, between mother and
son, go farther back than the play Oedipus by Sophocles, 425 B.C., the idea is brought
to light as far back as 1250 to 800 B.C., Homeric beliefs. The poem being non-fiction, is not a
judgment, it is not for me to make, perhaps M.R., was a tragic hero, perhaps
not, mothers have as much love as authority, and at times it can get blurred. But the poem needed to be written sooner or
later. We must take into consideration,
Oedipus, whom inspired me to write the poem, he himself was a daemon, or
demigod, king, and consort of the Queen.
