Old School



This is old school, I say
To my niece who, at five years old, is now
The same age her uncle was when his parents
Transported him to this place—new then, old now.
Old school, she repeats, repeating things
I say because I am older, because I am
Still interesting, because I am…old school.
Even I can see that.

You Can’t Go Home Again, someone once wrote
And he was wrong.
Of course you can—all you have to do is never leave—
Leaving it behind does not mean it leaves you.
(And certainly I can’t be the only grown child
who returns often—in dreams, in memories and yes,
in my mind, I must confess: earnestly, ardently, often—
to the old streets that I came to outgrow
the way we outgrow games and bikes and friends
and exchange them for jobs and cars and co-workers).

You can always go home, and you need to go home,
It is only when you want to go home that you should
Start asking yourself some serious questions.

“Did you play kick the can?” my niece does not ask.
Nor does she ask if I ever played
Red Rover Come Over or Smear the Queer.
Those games got outgrown, or else we learned
To play them in ways not measured in bravado & bruises.
And I wonder if we are better off:
Growth granting us the eventual awareness that everyone is
Queer and no enjoys being…

I put away childish things each time I think
About them, storing them safely inside my heart
Where grown-up games can’t make them say Uncle.

“Uncle, did you play?” she does not say.
(She does not know everything but she knows
enough to understand that her uncle was never young
the way she is and the way she’ll always be and
far be it from me to tell her any differently).
Question: Can you play?
Remember when that’s all we used to say—
Summers summarized in a phrase we learned
Eventually to outgrow.

This uneven field (Field of Dreams, I’ll never say)
Was our Fenway and with tennis ball and wooden bat
We righted the wrongs of an evil world, where
Yaz never struck out, Bucky Dent was a blip
And the Curse of the Bambino played off-Broadway
Those days, that ceaseless, sweltering summer in 1978.
(Summer, seventies, Schlitz—not malt liquor, my friend,
this was strictly old school—no bull. I remember
block parties, warm beer, burnt marshmallows, mosquitoes
and putrid bug repellent that didn’t kill anything
but made us stronger (Don’t let the bed bugs bite, I’ll never say).
I had no idea how much I did not know but
I knew this much: if there was a beer besides Schlitz or
Bud I was unaware of it—that’s all
The adults drank back in the bad old days.

Play ball! no one needed to say because we played ball
Anyway—ball was our business and business was good,
Get it: the ball would invariably make a break for it
Ending up in the gutter (we called it sewer but, of course,
We were old school). Without a second thought
We pried off the manhole cover and dashed down into semi-darkness.
We never thought twice about it—we were young.
The game must go on! no one needed to say, we knew.
(I look now, and think: I would not go
into that hole for all the allowance money I never earned—
I know there are rats and who knows what else
Down there: the things our parents never realized
They should warn us about).
We never worried about the things that were not
Waiting for us, down there in the darkness.

“What are they doing?” I do not ask aloud,
Noticing—just in time, before I can call attention to it—
Two cats in coitus, doing what they do when they are young & free.
That’s something I’ve never seen and as I worry about
My niece asking me about it I understand: I’m old now.
Old school, I cannot say (to myself I say this).
That’s how it happens.
This would never have happened, then—
(I did not know much, but I knew this:
cats did not fornicate and kids fought only with fists).
But this is what happens when you go away.
Back then, in our close and cloistered community
Even the cats had discretion (they were old school)
Or maybe they were mortified, because
Bent over with booze or barbiturates they were
Silently screeching behind closed doors—
All of us, unknowingly, out in the light
Winning the World Series, while wicked women
Garrisoned themselves in dark alleys, behind
The anodyne of automatic garage doors.
It is quiet, now. Our mothers were so quiet, then.
Please allow them to have been happy,
In our memories if not in their actual lives.

I don’t remember but I have a feeling
That if I think hard enough I will recall
The things that were never said and therefore never forgotten.

I drink in the past and am reminded of youth,
Which tastes unlike anything other than what it is: freedom.

Cold, sour Schlitz (of course I took a taste)
With those incredibly awkward silver ring-tabs
We pulled off for the privilege of first sip.
That is old school, I do not tell my niece.
It’s only when you’re older that beer tastes
Like freedom, but it’s a borrowed brilliance,
A manufactured feeling, just like in school
How it’s cheating if the answer is already in your lap.
It’s the things they can’t package or make you pay for:
Those things that they never tell you about until you are old enough
To know better: that is what freedom is.

Curiosity killed the cat, someone once said and
Maybe they were right.
But something is going to get all of us
Eventually, whether we ask for it or understand it.

The cats are gone, maybe they have gone home
(they can always go home), back to their families—
The heavy silences and signified banality of routine
(do they still have strict rules about no TV
and everyone present around the table when
dinner is served at six-thirty sharp?
I certainly hope so, for their sakes).
Or maybe they are getting down to business—
Dirty deeds and dirty work go hand in hand—
Down in the darkness, doing their thankless task,
Keeping the sewers safe from rats and reality.
Curious or content, we know enough to take
Whatever it is that life decrees.

We went into the sewers the way we went into the world:
Unafraid, unwavering, unencumbered and
Above all: unconcerned about all those things
Older people were kind enough to never…

“Old school!” my niece repeats, curious
because she does not comprehend at all.
Old school, I do not say, reticent
Because I do remember it (all).
If curiosity doesn’t kill us, contentment gets there quicker.

How did we go down there, then?
How do we go out there, now?



Sean Murphy, 3-20-02

October 20, 199_


Jim Morrison, I saw you today at a Chinese Buffet (6.95 all you can eat).
And I could not help but notice:
The dull complacency and exhaustion
That I saw in your eyes;
An obese stumbling gait imitating
Your once svelte Lizard King Prowl;
A resigned beard,
An indifferent slouch,
A southern drawl (scarcely audible)
Has replaced your butterfly scream.
Is it the tyranny of boredom?
A dream deferred:
To the safety of TV dinners
And the comfort of insipid re-runs
Before bedtime.

How was it?

To grow old and die at 27
Then: To start over again.
A play-thing of the gods.
The frenzied productivity
Of acid-fueled creativity;
A papier-mache soul,
A black and blue ego.
Everyday was Saturday,
A lifetime of summers
In only six years.
What was it like?
To die nightly
And live only to die:
Prurient fodder for the public eye.

How is it?

Now: Mysterious no more.
Burned inside-out
From your wandering, aimless rebellion.
Now it's Church on Sunday:
A banana peel reality.
Once you told us to wake up but have you
yourself awoken?
Trapped in this new-fangled slumber.
Do you remember? The message:
Even now its cadence echoes, falling
On the deaf ears of idle purchasers.

As Opposed To Prayer


Nervous and unnerved this evening, alone:
Searching for solace, something not unlike prayer,
A hope that the past will not repeat itself,
Progress: a preemptive strike, this procedure
(They call it a procedure when
They expect nothing unexpected).
Precedence and percentages: our family has a history,
Meaning that some part of someone who has died
Might be alive and unwelcome and somewhere inside.

Remembering: immeasurable moments, IVs and all
The unpleasant things you can’t force yourself to forget:
Bad days, worse days, glimpses of serenity then grief,
A flash focus of forced perspective—this too shall pass.
Then, inevitably, earlier times: I recall
When doctors and dentists handled us with bare hands.
Still living, then, in a past the future had not
Crept up on, a time when the truth was believable,
Because the only lies that children can tell
Get told to escape tiny troubles they’ve created.

And so I am uneasy and it’s not even myself
I am thinking about: frightened all over again
For my mother, and I can do nothing for her
Now, just as I could do nothing for her, then.
A cycle: she had seen her own mother suffer
While each of them made their anxious inquiries,
Appeals assailed the darkening clouds, out of time.

Like her son, she eventually became acquainted
With the white-walled world of procedures
And all that happens—before, during, after and beyond:
Hope and fear, faith then despair—the nagging need
To believe in men and the magic of machines
Or the things we say when no one is speaking.

I’m so scared, she said, to anyone who was listening.
I know I was, and we hoped that God was,
The God who may have done this and a million other things
In His austere, always unaccountable way.
In the end: she feared the truth but not the reasons why
Awful things always happen to almost everyone.
Me, I envied the armor of her fear, I understood
I could not even rely on those lovely lies
About a God I can’t bring myself to believe in.

We were there: a child and the man
Who brought me into this mess
(Something I’ve always acknowledged him for,
Something I’ll never quite forgive him for).
He said what needed to be said: nothing,
And I said what he said, after all,
What were we supposed to say, the truth?
The truth was this: we too were scared.

I’m so scared, she said, and we told her
It was going to be okay, we told her
We had reason to believe and we told her
Other things when the things we’d already told her
Turned out to be untrue: we never told her
The truth, which was that we were lying.

Fear and faith are useful if you can afford either/
Or, fear is free and lingers always, longer,
After it has served its purposeless point,
Like a stain on the street, days later.
Dying is nothing to be daunted by, it’s living
That takes the toll: living with death,
Living with life, being unprepared or unwilling
To be unafraid when it’s finally time to die.

I’m so scared, I say, to anyone
Who may be listening in the silence,
Wondering if they can do more for me
Than we could manage to do for her.
There is no one left to lie to—yet
The truth, as always, is immutable.
And so, if you are out there, please help me
To absolve this dread that no one can hear.


Sean Murphy, 3/17/03

She Walks On


She walks on, alone.

Leaving shadows and their secrets,
Bronzed backs broken, miseries muted,
Their once-sweet souls sucked clean.
Used up and useless now,
Digested and then discarded,
Secured and purpose served,
Savored—not in memory, forgotten
Like so many candy wrappers,
Picked up by the wind and
Put down by the rain and
Smothered in the snow:
All those seasons accounted for
In their empty eyes that no longer see.

She walks on.
But make no mistake, she knows:
She knows what she’s done and
She knows what she will do again,
And again she understands, inside
She can control time and defy the devils
Of age and faith and fear,
And the misfortunes of the flesh
That come calling, always too early
And always after—it’s already over and then
Her heart is hollowed-out, eaten up
By the same urgency that was once her ally.
Impatient and insatiable, unyielding even as her eyes
Cry, mirrors of the memories she made:
Her heart, used up and useless now
She walks on, alone.

Sean Murphy, 9-15-02