Valentina sank in the couch 
with a wall clock in her lap 
and an unwaivering stare into 
time.  pay close attention here 
and then it's so easy to lose yourself, 
but she's not lost, so don't fool 
yourself.  mother's Maker's Mark 
on the dry bar and she brushes 
Val's hair with golden intentions 
while a monkey takes time to think 
about dying on her breaking back. 
distinguished father and the 
rain clouds above his newspaper 
dropping scents of pipe tobacco and 
musk to the untrained nose, he greets 
the neighborhood each morning with a 
smile that took years of practice in his 
polka dot boxers and exposed hairy 
chest from an initialled silk robe. 

she was unnaturally beautiful; 
intimidatingly beautiful - but, 
Val didn't talk for some reason. 

in the summer, 
her father gave me twenty-five 
dollars 
to mow their lawn while he and 
the wifey were out for dinner.   
when i finished 
i ordered pizza for Val 
and i, 
and we'd get high and 
watch sitcoms 
and she always clapped at the end.  

i loved her. 
i wanted to love her, 
the way a woman should be loved 
by a decent man. 

in the winter, 
her mother ran the vacuum 
cleaner 
and neither her or her manly 
man knew how to work the 
breaker box.  so when i flipped 
the switch for them, i'd sneak 
and hand Valentina 
poetry i wrote just for her, 
and sometimes i'd see her 
crying in her room looking 
back to me from window to 
window - 
man i just wanted her voice. 

the marvelous Valentina 
went to college in 2006, 
and after two months in, 
she hung herself with a belt 
in her dorm closet. 

i received a letter from her 
though, 
before i'd heard the news - 
she told me that when she 
was 10, her father and his poker 
friends whom he owed money to, 
took her on a little "vacation" 
to his log cabin. 
they each took turns on her 
for payment, 
and when she screamed in pain, 
she was told to 
hush, hush, hush. 
when he took her back home, 
he told her: 
hush, hush, hush; 
and rocked her back and forth to calm her.

hush, hush, hush. 

hush, hush, hush. 

hush.              h   
    hush.       u   u 
        hush.           u 
    hush.    s                 
hush.                 h, babygirl.

she wrote me - 
i love you so much, 
but i am too used up 
and filthy now 
to give myself to anyone. 
when i enter Heaven, 
God will cleanse my body 
and we can spend eternity 
together when it's your time 
to meet me there. 

the silence; 
it sometimes came to her as 
a broken entity, 
like when a person recollects 
small fragments of their 
infancy; a surreal blanket 
for a logical creature. 
surviving traces of an evidently 
chronological servitude 
to unhealing scars from those, 
former years. 

that day, 
i called up a dirty surgeon i 
fronted 4 ounces of pot to, 
and told him he wouldn't have 
to pay me back if he could 
do me a big favor. 

her father was greeted the next day 
by a vacuum salesman 
with a...smile so much more perfect 
than his. 
the doc called me and put the phone 
up to this manly man's ear - 
and as each incision was precisely made, 
i just told him, hush: 
hush, for i am the unheard retribution 
that shall disconnect you from this world.                       
...and then he was silent.