Jeremy Szuder (he/him) lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, two children and two cats. He works in the evenings in a very busy restaurant, standing behind a stove, a grill, fryers and heating lamps, happily listening to hours of hand selected music and conjuring ideas for new art and poetry in his head. When his working day ends and he enters his home in the wee hours, he likes to sit down with a glass of wine and record all the various words and images that bear fruit within his mind. Jeremy Szuder only sets the cage doors free when the work begins to pile up too high. In this life, Szuder makes no illusions of being a professional artist in any way, shape, or form.
https://jeremyszuder.wordpress.com/
Son Of A Chance
Born from the body of a teenage girl,
backbone still hardening.
Born swimming quickly
against the riptide of addictive tensions,
through oceans of alcohol,
and punctured veils smoked grey,
through sugar hurricanes spinning inside her
and not much water to speak of.
Instructions for mothering upon birth, yes,
that would have been great.
Left instead with a whole lot of questions.
But the answer seemed to be that of;
“let him live”,
even if it came with the care tag
of being passed along to a more
able bodied family,
which was ruled out
once teenage momma saw
determination and majesty in baby eyes.
Born sleeping wherever rain could not lick us,
sometimes sleeping under the steering wheel
of a Volkswagen,
sometimes crashing at Grandpas home,
or the house of whoever had
the good drugs that day.
Born biding time and PUSHING teeth
through gum to bite the nipple of depression,
no, scratch that, I mean, desperation.
Born wondering why the prophets of our times
would have wanted to do a gig like this
more than once.
Born spinning clocks and tearing calendars,
waiting for the orchestra pit of my mother's
body as instrument,
to finish tuning up or down
so as to allow this son of a chance to conduct
the symphony of archaic existence.
Says mother-“Listen to the sounds of my song
play in the background of everything
you do, everyday of your life……………”
Like you,
dear reader,
I too will be
hammering out
my visions,
my escaped artistry,
my life plans etched into
my mothers bones,
from out of that
battlefield I called
the womb.
