That the Job of the Son Is to Fight the Father’s Battles

You’ll not be happy achieving someone else’s goals. You don’t 
really set out to do that anyway, but sometimes, about halfway 
through the marathon or your invasion of Iraq, the thought might 
occur to you. And suddenly it’s the 90s again, and I’m 
walking along some railroad tracks in San Marcos, TX, 
and I step through a cow skull, mostly skull, some face still on it, 
hollow though. Or mostly hollow. Kind of a crunch, half pop, 
and it doesn’t really stick to my foot so much as rise with it, 
and that night I have a dream I’m dead and working back 
at The Blue Dolphin as a busboy. We’re all dead, sort of swimming 
back into being there, and the cook is chasing a waitress, 
trying to grab her by the breasts from behind using soup ladles. 
He has a sunburn, and we call him Lobsterman. I’m thinking 
of trying cigarettes, being that I’m dead, and death means 
it would have to be the 1980s again, my clothes nothing 
but zippers, when my father walks in. Suddenly successful, 
he’s buying dinner for everyone, only the dead don’t eat. 
Maybe we don’t know we’re dead, which a lot of people say 
is a common problem for the dead, and I have to tell him 
that time isn’t really on anyone’s side as we’re walking along 
the railroad tracks. But he wants us to wait until dessert, 
which is talking time. We’ll talk over pie. You’ll see. There 
is governance to all things, and each its time and its place, like 
the Mission Accomplished signs we drape across the break room 
or the sudden blank look I get when waking, watching myself 
dragging sixteen bags of trash from the house after his heart attack.