The Home life Nathan Graziano's honey and wine BY SAM PFEIFLE
	HONEY, I’M HOME By Nathan Graziano | sunnyoutside | Somerville, MA | 200-copy limited edition | $5 | 52 pages | Nathan Graziano reads | at Acoustic Coffee | Tuesday, Sept 20 | 207.774.0404 | www.acousticspokenword.com

Before the mid-life crisis is the real-life crisis. For most men, anyway. Sure, when we’re 45 we want a Porsche and some more hair, but when we’re 30 we want our old life back. We remember how great it was when nobody said a word about the fact that we puked in a garbage can last night, knocked over a street sign on the way home, and woke up on a piss-soaked couch in the cigarette butt–littered living room at 1 pm. We actually had friends back then, we went to shows seven nights a week, and our jobs were things we could quit any damn time we felt like it. Health care? Fuck that. Haven’t been to the doctor in five years, dude (except for that time — well, that’s neither here nor there).

Now we’re 30, though, and we wake up at 6 am every goddamn day because that’s when the kid gets up, whom we love, don’t get us wrong, we’d step in front of a bus for her, but couldn’t she sleep in once in a friggin’ while? We’re tired, and sometimes bored, and if we have to go to work one more day that’ll just be the end, the day we put a gun in our mouths and — whoah! Feeling a little sorry for ourselves are we?

Poet Nathan Graziano is. Well, his first-person protagonist in Honey, I’m Home is, anyway. In the collection of not-quite-prose poems, he’s got that real-life crisis bad, he does. His life pretty well sucks. And it’s his fault. He’s sure of it. He’s not up to snuff. He has breakfast with depression (in "Breakfast with Depression") and "the Red Sox lost again," even though the team has pretty much been good for the past decade (though the book is brand-new, it’s possible the poem is pre-championship, but still . . .). In the next poem, he notes that "I’ve always been a bit of a pussy."

"Me in Twenty-five Years" hits on bartenders half his age.

His stepdaughter asks how he got her mother pregnant, in "Ambiguity." He responds:

I told her that I used

an extremely large power tool

which many people fear

because of its massive size.

There’s got to be a psychological term for that.

As the collection progresses, Graziano opens up a touching world of self-doubt and a sort of hope against all hope. This is a normal guy here. This is a normal family. The guy’s reading David Sedaris stories to his wife while she’s in labor and Walt Whitman poems to his daughter in her crib. He’s got a gay uncle and

I’ve learned to never question

whose turn it is to get up

when the baby cries at three a.m.

Yet, for him, the normalcy isn’t a comfort, it’s a crushing weight, "chicken bones" he can’t swallow. All he remembers of his ex-girlfriends are the "muffled sobs." The drip of a leaky ceiling is his "wedding song." Why?

Can

someone

pour me

a drink?

It’s a look inside the mind of an alcoholic made all the more powerful for the slow build-up, for the poems about the guys at Home Depot. These aren’t poems about some gutter drunk. These are poems about the guy on the front cover, the guy in the nice suit, the fedora, and the leather loafers. Even the guy who calls out, "Honey, I’m home!" can lose the battle of the real-life crisis, and there are plenty of ways to lose it.

It’s the little things, captured wonderfully in the form of "My Daughter’s Eyes." I love the way the poem seems to wobble, sentences etched in lines that sway between three and six syllables, like eyes that won’t quite focus. And the finishing thoughts Graziano leaves us, separated with a line break like an O Henry finish. Sometimes they echo one another, like those that finish the sections of "A Paper Ark": "In case of a flood." "It’s never supposed to rain." "But he hasn’t seen my ark."

That ark is built from newspaper, something that just might hold out. But it might just as easily sink.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com