"The Way Of Sons And Fathers"

A father
Drives into his son’s life
And when he pulls away
That son is bleeding
In a ditch

A master of violence
Need not raise a hand
To draw blood.
Like a flesh eating virus
It is a million tiny things
That might invade a baby’s fragile immunity.

Sometimes
The after-effect of the father is delayed.
From uncharacteristic exhaustion,
A little boy slips into a warm sleep.
Then come the nightmares.
Then the fracture.
He wakes a year later from a coma
In an abandoned hospital room
Filled with garbage and cobwebs.
Emaciated, malnourished,
Covered in layers of dead skin,
He is now patient and detective
Caught in a mystery of lost time.

A father’s every word
Is a salve, an anti-toxin, a secret remedy...or a poison.
The same can be said about his gaze and choice of reaction.
Such immense and undue power is a heavy load for him to bear.
But once a man has so stupidly
Entered a woman without forethought
This albatross will be his punishment and his children's suffering
For a lifetime.
Amazing how a second of ecstasy
Is secretly married to
The black king of all disasters.

A father
Walks into his son’s life,
Kicks him in the groin,
Cries for the effort it took to lift his leg
And leaves him on the sidewalk:
Howling, tears streaming down his cheeks, gasping for breath.

The Power of Refusal

There is a point
Where nothing matters.
Everything one knows
Has been tried.
Nothing is getting easier.
Everything is getting harder.
Even lifting a pen hurts.

Time is moving faster
And in looking back upon it
We see that things have
Slowly but very steadily
Gotten worse.
One would have never known
Were it not for scraps of evidence
In the form of old letters,
Pictures of vibrant health
Songs from a long time ago
That are reminders
Of our innocence,
How simple things were,
And how much wonder life held.

It's like the rain on a windshield
In which one drop moves to another,
Absorbs it, and continues to cannibalize
On it's plummet.

A voracious pain
Eats our insides up
As we race to find
A single shining answer.
Some will fall to the ground a hollow carcass.
Some will emerge The Phoenix.

As adults
We all know that
The conditions of our lives
Are of our own making.
If those conditions are
Sorrowful, degenerating and haunted,
The ultimate pain is that
We ourselves are responsible.
It is the burden
Upon all other burdens
Which brakes the back
And fades the spirit.
Who in their right mind
Would want to live another day
Bearing such guilt
While continuing to refuse to do
Anything about it?

Sometimes,
The Power of Refusal
Is all that is left.
We cling to it,
Even if it is the refusal
To fight for a better life
As we have tried to do so many times before