“I didn’t teach you to be like this,” my mother used to say,
“It’s the books that’s making him crazy!” a common refrain
from my father, who would extract my novels like used needles,
and it would embarrass me sometimes, when it was Lolita,
120 Days of Sodom, American Psycho, which didn’t help my case & the dirty feeling was as if they had a point in their tidy assault, how I’d return to my plain room after monotonous days on end, becoming a prisoner to the mind of Dostoevsky as they screeched for me louder than feasting coyotes, and then the gestapo arrived, seeing me with the product, “when did you get this one?” he’d ask, followed by dumping them in the biohazard bin & like a junky
the wild hunt would begin again, and so I guess
it was just a matter of perspective.

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