Don Simms Has a Message for You

by Darren Morris

 

My father, yet alive but without purpose,
loosens his mind like a botched windsor
or the rope of a dinghy on a lake at night.

The Boomers conspire to lose their sanity.
Nearing death, angels pepper his half-sleep
with air defense. His bombs dropped long ago.

Without throwing ourselves over their coffins,
couldn’t we still rise to the occasion of loss?
Or had we inherited their stark indifference?

Don Simms, my little league football coach,
would have something to say at this point.
He would whack you sharply on your helmet.

He would say, Listen up. Cut the crap. Stop
fucking around, dipshits. You are blowing it.
You ain’t doin’ yer job. So pay attention.

Distraction was the largest threat back then.
Not ability or lack thereof. We were small.
One kid was as talentless as the next.

Some were more sluggish. Some were
afraid of violence. Some had weak chins.
If we got hurt during the game

we were told to lie still so the ref
could stop play, and they could get to us.
The following Saturday, I got hurt

so lay there looking up at nothingness
the way I did when I played the baby Jesus
in the manger on Christmas Eve at church.

The whole game stopped for me and I felt
holy and wept a little at my holiness.
It was maybe the first time I remember

leaving my body and looking down on it.
The men finally got to me. My facemask framed
their heads in an iconostasis: Coach Simms

filled my left eye, the team doctor in my right.
What’sa matter? Asked Coach. I held up
one hand with my blessed finger trembling,

unbroken, and told them someone stepped
on it. At which point, the doc arose and Coach
told me to Get the fuck up. You ain’t hurt.

And then he cracked me sharply on my helmet
and down I came back into my body and walked
alone, not carried aloft, off the field. I was six.

Fifty years hence, my father is busy chasing fake
sex partner profiles online, in his dark, labyrinthine
archive of fantasy. It muddies his relationship

with reality. It takes his money. It infects devices.
Which he calls me now in a froth of despair, only
to offer some fix. Fretting, not over unpaid taxes

not over the destination or station of the soul,
but for the perplex of technology he does not need.
I need Don Simms to interrupt. I need Coach with

clipboard in hand, to slap my father hard
and snap him out of it. I need Coach Simms
to say, Listen up. Cut the crap, you baby.

Everybody cries now and then. But you
ain’t worth your salt, not compared to those
bastards that weep over what was lost.

 

 

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Darren Morris is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. His work appears in the current issues of The Yale Review and Willow Springs Magazine. His poems are forthcoming at the American Poetry Review.