Michael Receives Advice from Marceline the Vampire, the Queen of the Deadbeat Daddy Issues, on How to Cope with an Absent Father

By Michael Frazier
Just cause he’s your blood
           you can’t expect him to stay.

The wet red of men will abandon a body
if offered the opportunity
                                               of a gash.

                                               This is vampire one-o-one
dude. You think you’re the only one with a phantom
for a papa?

Before my old man
made home in a dimension
where I do not exist, he was the type of father
                      to forget his child needs
food to survive, can’t live off
promises. Black suit
pointed canines: my dad, too, is in the business
of policing bodies
                                  (when they’re post-body).
And he wants me
           to love him
                                  for who he is
not: ignore how he’s held a weapon
           longer than he’s held me, how he’s more committed
           to untethering souls from bodies
           than to his family. I said, I want to be a musician,

and he handed me a battle axe,
smiled, asked
           if  I wanted to rule over the night
and its many spheres—
           if  I liked the sound of that?

You know what I did? I tricked that axe
           into a murderous bass: attached a bridge,
           pickups, strings, and plucked a defiant riff till
daddy was so filled with disapproval, he imploded
into memory.
                                  I don’t fret
           over him anymore.
                      I fret the neck of my bass,
           let the notes speak to me.

                                  When I swing
I inflict a violence he can’t comprehend.
           When I sing, I can shred silence
into melody: a sorrow that can’t kill
me. You should give that a try.

Music is just a purposeful arrangement
of absence;
                      a juxtaposition of what is here
and who is not.

Some days I want to snap the neck
of my bass and quit calling all my hurt

back into my room to watch
wide-eyed as I perform,
but, then, who’d keep me company?

Besides, all of the greatest hits

          that have moaned out

                                  my bloodshot bass
                                  have been the consequence
                                               of pain that crawled into my chest
                                                                                  like an abandoned child
and cried itself

into song.

Notes:

This poem originally appeared in a student anthology published by the Speakeasy Project.

“Not Too Hard to Master” is a series of poets writing on form and sharing a prompt. Read Michael Frazier’s essay on persona, “It’s Not a Mask If You Wear It Right,” his poems “At Church, I Tell My Mom She’s Singing Off-Key and She Says” and “What the Moon Said to Michael,” as well as his writing prompt.

Source: Poetry (May 2024)