Pictures

i am home for christmas, and
my mother, who always has something
squirreled away that she never talks about,
digs out some
Actual Printed Photographs, memories
themselves, regardless of the things on them

i remember only that i must have seen these
photos before, back when they meant nothing to me
i recall thinking even as a child that
the ones that were square were relics
because in these modern times
photos were kodak, rectangles, glossy
like they would always be going forward

and here is my goddamned father
looking nothing like I’d ever recognize
totally clean-shaven,
in a terrible white suit, and
the worst glasses I have ever seen,

(worse even than the ones I used to
voluntarily select to wear myself,
the big ones with the bar across the top and
the special tinting where they turn dark if you
step out into the sun, and
the lenses that were so big that if my cheekbones
were eyeballs
they’d have had perfect corrected vision)

my mom with those damned
lace sleeves, that make your arms look like
gift-bagged tissue-papered fleshy
christmas presents,

i ask my mother good lord,
where were you guys in this,
was this some sort of party or,
no this was our wedding,
she says
their wedding

aside from a brief stint
in the weird mid-90s divorce years
i have always known my father with facial hair
of some sort, when he shaved it off he looked
kind of like a mix between my grandmother
and alex trebek
we were all glad when it came back

as i look at his weird naked face
i can’t help it,
i think about geraldo,

the talk show guy you know with
the big fuckin’ ned flanders mustache
and how many times he’s been married,
which is five, he has been married five times.

and i wonder, does his new wife make him
shave off the ol’ soup strainer
for his wedding pictures each time,
or does he even bother to get wedding pictures taken
the third, fourth wedding?

at what point, at what juncture in life does
geraldo say “you know what,
fuck it, no pictures”
or does he, maybe thinking oh, geraldo,
this time it’s gonna work out,
let’s do the pictures, let’s do it up nice
for edith/sherryl/cynthia/erica

because i mean,
maybe for them ladies it’s their first
wedding and they wanna really have
the pictures

for geraldo the mustache is so much a part of who he is,
we know him as the mustache guy, can you
even fucking imagine geraldo without the mustache?
i would like to see geraldo’s wedding pictures,
if there are any,
because i wanna know if that cat shaved off
his goddamned mustache for the pictures or not
did you know that geraldo’s wikipedia entry
does not feature the word mustache, not even
one time!
(the word satanic is featured four times,
hoodie twice
and panties just once)

i look down at my alien father
and android mother, and
wonder what motivates people-
when they are paying a lot to get photographs taken
to chronicle an event as it was in that moment
to capture the spirit of those times-
to change everything completely,
to make themselves unrecognizable for that brief moment

to say to each other, “hey”
“wouldn’t it be a shame if in these pictures we looked
exactly how people remember us, and
how we remember ourselves?”

and they shave off their hair and get
their hair done and sometimes
color their hair or wear different clothes, or makeup, or
they have their photographer
contort their bodies into weird positions
and scenarios
that would occur nowhere in actual reality,

kind of like the cosmopolitan sex position guide,
something kinky like the milwaukee bowtie
the calamity driver (for flexible sexperts)
or “the hidden valley ranch”

and they show you these photos in which
all existence has been distorted in an effort to achieve
some sort of mental ideal that ends up more
ridiculous than precious, memorable more because
of the effort expended to take the shot
than the moment preserved
these photographs of people that looked this way
for a couple hours once
and never again

that evening we open presents,
my mother has framed and wrapped one of the pictures
to give to my girlfriend
it is a photo of me at the age of ten
looking more uncomfortable in my body
than any human has ever been,
even ones engaging in the cross-fingered crippler

i am wearing sweatpants with holes in the knees
because i thought jeans were uncomfortable
and my shirt is tucked into them,
and those giant fucking glasses,
with the bar on top, just how i remember

he used to look just exactly like that,
my mother tells her
the same hair, the same glasses, the clothes
that same
terrified look on his face, his posture,
he would never pose for a picture,
it’s like a time capsule, the perfect representation

as i mentally revise the likelihood forecast down
of this evening ending up with my gal and i
cruising through the last few sections of the
erotic fourteen stages of the cross
i look over at the ridiculous wedding picture
and wonder if reality is really
so much better