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Suckerfield Sorrow
by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri

 


Moon rises over the soccer field, soccer field that you have deemed the suckerfield, for it's a place where people wander round and round, pretending to achieve, to succeed, even though they have depressing lives to return to. Bad spouses, bad dads, like your own mustache man, perhaps. Drunkenness, bills. But you cannot think of all this. You must pretend too. Lights flicker across the fields, the voluptuous curves and winding circular paths, a torchlight procession, beckoning warmth from homes that all look the same, but that look better than the mustache man's black hole that smells of farts and misery, rife with papers, organized by no particular logic. You drown out the mustache man's daily lectures, try to stay away as long as you can. You walk the suckerfield, absorbing what beauty you can, sky washed in a tender lavender, the gray and gold clouds bursting. You stare at the mountains bathed in shadows, try not to think of the mustache man who lives only a few blocks from the suckerfield, a man whose home is bathed in criticism, a sound system playing The Secret, mustache man's mustache bristling, nasal words spilling: You're too selfish. Don't be a writer, be a lawyer. Get pussy, he proclaims, without guilt, as if pussy is just another conquest. You're too honest. Words dissect, strip you bare. Expose the things you hold within your mind, that he needs control over.

You're a bad son, he says. You fight this at the suckerfield. You walk, you march to your own beat. Even though you're just walking like the other suckers. Bourgeois suburban suckers at the suckerfield.

On you walk, around the suckerfield. It's too early to go back there. You say this over, over, even as the lavender metamorphoses into a beautiful velvet, the moon round and large. You try to imagine yourself someone else's son. Maybe you're really adopted? Real parents beckon somewhere, a mother in lavender weeping, hiding in the shadows. This is stupid. Dream disintegrates like stardust. It's still too early to go back. Too early. Night is young, beautiful. Even though mustache man waits, more demands, more criticism hanging over that house like a stale armpit smell. Still too early, even as velvet turns into a black, moon a little less pretty, stars stabbing you like the mustache man. You try to hold onto whatever you can, the tender breeze, the moonlight on the nearby ponds, the smell of ganja even, but it's futile. The mustache man waits, and you will inevitably return to the mustache. And tomorrow you will return to the suckerfield and wander and wander, and imagine things you cannot have, even though you perfectly deserve them.


 

a black line

 

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