Sticks

By Thomas Sayers Ellis

My father was an enormous man

Who believed kindness and lack of size

Were nothing more than sissified

Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded,

His eyes were the worst kind

Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard.

No one could outshout him

Or make bigger fists. The few

Who tried got taken for bad,

Beat down, their bodies slammed.

I wanted to be just like him:

Big man, man of the house, king.

A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit,

I learned to use my hands watching him

Use his, pretending to slap mother

When he slapped mother.

He was sick. A diabetic slept

Like a silent vowel inside his well-built,

Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that

With similar weaknesses

—I discovered writing,

How words are parts of speech

With beats and breaths of their own.

Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam!

An heir to the rhythm

And tension beneath the beatings,

My first attempts were filled with noise,

Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows.

The page tightened like a drum

Resisting the clockwise twisting

Of a handheld chrome key,

The noisy banging and tuning of growth.

Source: The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press, 2005)

Biography

Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005) and a chaplet, Song On (WinteRed Press, 2005) and his interview with Bootsy Collins appears in Waxpoetics #18. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Lesley University low-residency Creative Writing Program.

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