Two Bedtimes in Twenty Eight

Two Bedtimes in Twenty Eight

Conflicted, starring off dockside into these shallow waters

Reflecting and rippling in convex waves warping back the mirrored images

Bending like lighting rods sizing up times passing into iterations

Shooting in from nothing into everything into the glimpse of an eye blinking

All of it gone as a child aging in the grasp of a parent

So much intended to be conveyed and the reach of differential impact

Seizes back in infantile impotent snares of paternal teachings

To change the growth patterns of offspring with maddening effect

That nothing can be done, birthdays are scattered in a shoebox

With candles counted in match sticks flicked in spent flecks of magnesium

Separated in a red knob on tan wood igniting in seconds smoking

In the gaseous whirl, four into six into twelve into eighteen years

Matured and knowing a world defined, pertinent and stagnant

Like a bolt on a door locked from the outside,

Penned in would be Persephone into this space

There is no exit for her, this path into this paradigm imprinted

With me away, with me here reading dispersed bed time stories

Either twice a month or half her nights, is that not material to this equation?

Am I like an interchangeable pawn to this board? 

Regicide enacted as if the room knows the queen is the most powerful

So why not protect her with this meaningless king

A castle overturned, a bald rook exchanged and these movements worthless

One step so small three-hundred and sixty degrees of movement

Yet, the circumference of this circle is utterly limited

I can not alter the outcome with this Adam’s apple spoiled and rotting in this throat

A voice dumb, boxed into these confines sanctioned by laws of gender

Intuitive disasters, sapphire into jade eyes, alabaster hands begging for a compass

The desire to prognosticate the integrations of sunsets and pillow prayers

Of what may be if I was not there, quality over quantity

Bantered as if I am incapable of discerning the dichotomy

As if my manhood should be gracious for Longshanks scraps

My butterfly, I begged to scream my love like a billows blowing on your fire

Expanding into an inferno and scavenge the sticks of this countryside to build a nest

In rebuke you scatter this twig and twine in naming mine

The root of dissonance to your chords and obliterate this accord

That I can not even have you on my side in this, the great lonely confines

Abandonment, choice of righteous condemnation over pontificated empathy

You tab me selfish, judge me ungracious, remind me of my well-known imperfections

The strengths of my adversary, your joint feminine prowess like a pass card of freedom

To route the man I wish you would have chosen to love and beat him against the ropes

To pummel his face into a vagabond oblivion of purple swollen regalia

And take her side like a teacher’s union membership card in a wallet

Astute and pragmatic and the best interest of the child like a hypothesis proven

Fathers like superfluous dust covers on unread books, of Tuesday library trips never taken

Of training wheels left on, of bed times never routine, of class room rules never written

With twice a month gold star stickers never earned and no airplane in sight

Twenty-four hour moms commended and twenty-four hour dads condemned

Same life, divergent rules, no way to make amends

Memories like replicated fingerprints as if my own could be sliced off in the divorce

And pasted to my daughter’s mother’s hands and she could smudge them as she hugs her

As she fixes her breakfast or reads her stories, these prints are suitable replacements

For my stead cleaning windows for our daughter to look through transparent

For clarity’s sake of every truth, but our path to here

Family like a reconstructed Frankenstein, I pray for lighting in the words of my butterfly

And you cast me monster ill with want of my own salvation in arms of those

I dare beg to hold me, to break bread and laugh and relish this parallel universe

I brave to make my home and I besmirch the name of love in my request

I am man and I am monstrosity, this guilt of my own continued existence

Bakes in my blood to know how much easier it would seem to be on everyone

If I simply ceased to exist, if I disappeared into a vagabond wasteland of Dallas nights

So much joy and elation at how many variables could be extricated from this equation

And no one would have to ponder proofing the solution

These waters could clear and the lucid transparency would beam back up this dock

Sight like clouds parting and all these hours damning myself in heart on why God whys

Of ignorance to an adulteress wife, of playing the pawn all along

Of bearing my soul for a doppelganger love, bludgeoned in this ring

Mute in this match, awaiting a judges’ decision for a Pyrrhic victory

I understand why daughters should be with mothers, trumps husbands and fathers like dominoes

We are coarse walls sturdy to be beaten or absent targets easily hit with pain rationalized

Endurance a masculine precept along side feminine pity, a want to comfort, to cease harming

A destination for this man’s savior complex, even I in the maelstrom wanted to appease her

To make it easier on her journey and with razorblades sharpened with my trust

I awake drugged and my fingertips sliced and absent pondering the nature of love

My butterfly, I so wanted to love you, but I realize you do not know me at all

You do not know my genetic kryptonite, but as an astronomer to Orion’s belt

Our dream obliterated, unnamed, God’s gift rejected

My guilt I lie to you about when it surfaces in the refractions of light upon these waters

I wonder in the iterations if you were her, if I would be so disposable

A two in twenty-eight to you, the man you have glimpsed at, rationalized

In a psychological statistic, apathetic to this love in all its flavors and all its forms

Futile and rejected, spit out onto the concrete and I see it sewer in these streets

I drive by it everyday knowing I am expelled, regurgitated component of a would-be family

Better off biting this bullet and ceasing to exist in this normality

Like retched clarity that this is nature’s hierarchy, distaff vows are disavowed

Love is an optional time bomb ticking, the lioness ripping the hunted prey

And I will resign this mane as an indolent sperm donor

Wandering in an orchard of orphan offspring, encouraged to do so and go

Live this life in a stereotype befitting of calculus turned addition to appease

The idolatry of the dolt, the lowest common denominator of factoid over heart

I am poet, I am writer, I am love pleading in these concrete streets for a partner

Life giver by proxy, half murdered and half alive and disparage me for my try

Seeking a brother to hold my hand, faith like a promised land at least from my papillion

I dreamt of rebuilding my family amidst an us, your womb and my blood,

To condemn my fatherhood so adamantly rips open the disparity between

The family we ever could have had as I would never be the man

You wish your son could call dad

Intentions benign, erudite in mind, wanting your heart like a lost art

Resurrected on my sullied canvas, praying to shed this label of refuse

Discarded material, pride broken, little lion man roaming

Confidant alienated, estranged sabotage, ingratiated to no one

Not daughter, not crab, not butterfly, not I, I am failing like the king’s chess piece

Three-hundred sixty degrees of check mate, and I succumb and I won’t run

I made my move. I stand tall and await the sword, regicide on these seas

Judge me cold, distant and bold a partner rolled into a corner of a life I know we can never have

Choosing this before I met you, choosing over despite the menu

Limited, the thicket in this prison, you supporting my own independence

“And I will die alone and be left there and I will just go home and God knows where.”

He will be my brother and love me in the ghost of grace in this world

Broken-hearted prefixes of being here for two or fourteen nights

Same mortgage, same job, same life, take these chains and light the light

In a cave that is not my daughter’s home, just a visitation arrangement

Acknowledge in payments disavowed for her to understand the dynamics of abandonment

Pride like a mandatory masculine sublimation rotten away by the nature of

Uterine court room walls and I fall on your mercy to understand

To give me this in my tears of our friendship, to sympathize in this, to love me as friend

To see my turmoil and torment, to see my measures to be the man

To overcome rather than to succumb to the lunar tides, menstrual lines I dare to cross for love.