When you were my mother, and mothered me, and told me what to do,
When you stopped your life for me, this was love—all love is, I knew.
They held everyone accountable in the psychology books:
Mother needs to love you, and your father needs to love your mother. Otherwise we become perverts and crooks.
That’s what the world in a dream, did; they put this truth in books.
We knew it was true. Until the sellers came along, with their new and fancy looks.
Mother in the store window. Mother in a bra. What did I see
That I hold dearly to my poetry?
What did I experience, that I hold
Poetry close, seeing normalized perversions sold?
They say to know what it is, look at where it came from, then
It is too late—if you fall in love with a snake, slithering out of its den.
Did she say goodbye to your father? Or, mother, did you say goodbye to me?
This room will be a stream for eternity.