What if Widower

What if Widower

The widower or the slandered collateral of a shrouded adultery

Would I have chosen the first if I could have?

If I ever had a choice in these matters of estate and reputation at stake

In these jungle-land courtrooms and town square lynching’s

Of character, faith and hope in all that I thought I had known

Strung up under that rope, looped around my throat like a pincher’s grip

A choker’s piercings and no room to slip out a sound a verb of retort

Just a dry horse voice muted dumb under this sort

Of gender bias and numb shock at planned out divisive plot

To be in a berry-land with the bald replicant and my head plopped

Out on the plate like John from the Baptist for the queen

Served up as a party favor with sparse-tongued detail tooth picks

Blasphemy and indignity rolled up like a crape tight and sparkling

To hide her mistakes like a diploma from a university of rationalized

Action and alibi hours of validation for her choice to abandon

This man and his flowers growing in the garden planted and strangled

Winter buried and gargled salt to sanitize foul breath

Force a body out on the street, strip naked in theft

Of the woman I loved, my daughter, my home, my font of companionship

Thrust out from my hold sneering at me as if I am villain

Accused of such abuse encircled in ribbons, shame, admonishment

Lily white to our four-year old, Mother was kindly sage
Savior, father was Grendel thrashing

Pained like a destructive wildfire rage

He was this explanation for all of this pain
That she surely would feel and want to repair

Extracting her dad, insert the bald robot too perfectly bare

He could now be called dad, hold her, love

Switched-around face, if only the original would scurry off

The way she had planned this husband holocaust

But like a Scooby Doo movie I had to ruin everything meddling for my kid

Dress up for Halloween and offer an independent lens

To this madness, this indulgent parade comes down too simple and ancient

Yet unspoken refrain; mother’s lips dumb and squelched in her own inertia

That her life was just a lie with an f in it and her love was indefinite

Terminated on a respirator run by me and when she could see my concerns there

Was no need to pretend this extreme ruse of a marriage that she treated me with love

I was just her statue to stand next to, a perpetual embarrassment

To fuel her resentment for not having what she felt she deserved
A man more befitting of her small-town castle and parental concerns

I can not recall the smell or touch of love, memories are erased

I am mutated to a distance, inept at detecting that pulse on a body

Perpetual CPR, is the heart beating? the lungs breathing? or is this all just

Making matters worse? I can not decipher the measure of this curse

Upon my shell, cadaver or comatose limbs arranged in a sequence

Metered out in hours spun into spider-web years. that there is no man left

To feel in these anesthetized fears of something fresh, redefined

To erase this black marker and re-draw these phosphate lines

A gray day washing powerful in potential and all of this back liner

Keeps beating in sequential circles rippling chest compressions

Let this frail body die, so a rebirth can ingest novel morsels

Of halcyon mornings and feast on the fruits of naked bodies yearning

For all that is genuine and not of what was

A neck could escape the tower of stunned, mosquito stomach dens and beer bottle porches

Walks in the rain and extinguishing torches, hard-wood rolls whimpering in folds

Of yesterdays withering and time stabbed and shivering

Would it have just been so much easier if she had died and I could claim widower

Her parents would have embraced me as a champion of the pillar of what

I thought I had in my family a place set out from this tragedy

A dignified sympathetic figure holding together and inevitably bitter

At the why did God let this happen to me, but inevitably my wife would be gone

And remembered fondly, my daughter would be without her mommy

In the greatest contingent travesty of such a offshoot shaft I don’t wish that upon her

For any thorns out my own path, and inversely that is why I can not leave this place

I can not slay her father from her days like a missing persons report filed in her mind

Of why did he leave, and why does this hurt, keep circling my window

Of the nights of where could he be and stories of abandonment and replacement dads

Flow in the creek of the world she is so entrenched and exposed to and

Drown in so much absurd, ‘why don’t you have a bigger house, daddy?”

An answer to a question I can not help you learn, until you are older

And you are sage enough to see, the true story of your mother and me

And maybe that day will come, maybe it won’t but I know I need to help you learn

How to swim to escape the surrounding moat, of her castle her towers of told

Of what reality is spun in the web works of old memories that happened

When you were oh so young to recall, these old-timey stories of four year old stalls

In this desert and hurricanes to Texas dancing

A line dance of lawyer-accounting dinner nights and bed time routines abstained

So powerless I left myself to be, my apologies to you and my apologies to me

Maybe it would have made a difference maybe it would have not

All I know is I stood up for us when that rope was looped and before

She could completely tie the knot, I was and am your only dad

The world can call me many things in this blur, but I have earned that stamp

Upon my passport to travel with you upon these years.  I will continue to be

The man to hold your hand through these fears, until you are ready and older

And prepared to know a broader truth explained to you so you can grow

Up and out from this place and from me, to find a love of your own

In whatever language he speaks, not of tradition or who I was

To live your own life and in that I will love

You for your beautiful reverberating self, you as my daughter, a woman, yourself

Love your mother, your father, love us all
There are no monsters, only frightened villagers
In fragile fallible bodies, We all love you