The Kitchen I
I am one year closer to death.
On my birthday my father tells me this,
as we connect the pieces of track
to a super-raceway set, as we click together
each smooth strip to form a figure eight
that swirls across the kitchen floor.
He helps me guide the matchbox racer
through its twisting over linoleum,
its geometric mess some murky hell
into which we might flip. We study
for hours the speeding and slowing,
the skid and the spin, the restless gambling
with God. My father is like a god,
his grip on the joystick leaning in
to the inevitable, the slick swish past
the previously traveled, the one-more mile,
the one-last second. My father and I,
motoring one year closer to death.
mareymercy. 
Ooh, dark. The father is characterized so well from the first two lines, although I expected a different ending. “God” twice in the same line was awkward– maybe switch the second to “deity” or something?
Well, I did capitalize one and not the other, so that was my concession to the repetition. LOL. He’s like A god, not the The God. And yeah, the ending isn’t great, but really this poem is just a setup for Part I & II that I’ll post later. This one’s also REALLY old.
I assumed the God thing was a transitional thought, from speaking of God to then thinking of your father and to then using god to describe him. I love poems that do that. Transitional thoughts like that, I mean. “I went to the store today to buy dog food. But I had left my dog Sparky at home. Earlier today, Sparky and I went to the park and played near Morse Lake. It made me remember that as a child mother would take me there to Morse Lake, and let me feed the crusts of white bread to the ducks. This morning as I went to make the toast, there was only the white crusts left. It made me realize how much I miss mother.” – as you can see I’m not very good at it. Yours was far more powerful, concise and compact…. I liked it. I wold keep god in there…..
Thanks – it does sound weird with it repeating like that, but honestly I’m more interested in the poems that come after this one anyway.