I miss you every
day posing as if one of us
Is deceased
depending on the hour
Contemplating the
only rationality for such distance
Is death
Yet, I am posing
as a father alive
Taking to the
streets, the dinner table,
Breakfast of a
singular cereal bowl in repetition
A fortnight in
between
Seeing your face,
like nine months
Your mother’s
blood, the yell of announcing Sarabelle
Cutting the
umbilical and shimmering up your mother’s gullet
After holding her
right leg for the pushing
All of this time
seeing your eyes knowing every day hence
Would be
different, but the definition of your existence
“I do not live
‘less I live in your light.”*
So I am a ghost,
I will imbibe death
Slow the beat in
my chest, dull the weight
The pulsating
fervor to intake the call to call
The pull to
dissolve the sugar in milk, the urge to drink coffee
Wake and accept
who will;
Raise you and
witness, accept and forgiveness
Parts truncated
whelps; time knocked off the shelf
Split and it is
shattered on the floor of what matters
To me on what
will grow into you at sixteen in July
As if I am a
phantom; a phantasmal image of a man
Witnessing only
in the refraction of light off a window pane
Sunsets on Sunday
nights like a vampire approaching daylight
Fridays evenings
like a werewolf reprieved from the full moon
Imagining your
partners, the man you will dance with
After your first
dance with your husband
Shoes and excuses
like tissues for tears I am crying today
Secluded in the
bleachers of your little league soccer escapades
The names, the
names, the town, the refrains
Repeat and
complete and silence is the only vantage replete
With the bastion
for your father to ration
It is necessity
for one of us to live as dead; zombify and better me instead
Hanging onto
Carpathian soil, tangent
Like a spirit
spliced in the realm that slivered-me,
Believing in a
fragment of a memory in order to occasionally hold your hand
I am alive again;
for a light beam bending I recollect what love was
In the sending of
an embrace; as if that is what I might call
The tide of hours
churning life; to savor a moment among perdition and paradise
Transposing
revolutions right here on Earth in the belly of what
I cannot disperse
or embrace in full
The lack of
lactate, the hirsute armpits; I was never fit
To do anything
alone, but to live; I am cactus
You deserve to
dance in the rain puddles; your mother can give you a flood
But even a cactus
blooms; I will give you every petal I have
Butterflies
landing; I keep praying to a religion-less God
Knowing this path
is not so novel or arduous to trod
But, I miss you
every day, knowing I try not to make you miss me
Because there is
the wall between spirits and men,
Bones and what a
father has not the luxury to pretend
Is so close to
death; the cold, the frigid, the needle
Right at the edge
of the tinder; poked and ablaze
Combustion and a
girl may never have a Virgil-guide out the maze
To get to sixteen
or thirty or a day past the learning
I am no martyr;
no saint; full of mistakes; balancing the tolls for the road
Pockets heavy or
light, guts crunching for the insomnia of midnight
Empty pink
bedroom down the hall and the poster tape holds for now
Flower paintings,
Scoobert Doo, Adventure Time and I love you’s
“I do not live
‘less I live in your light.”*
“I do not live
‘less I live in your light.”*
“I do not live
‘less I live in your light.”*
I will show you
what it means to be alive, by breathing into my insides.
I will show you
what it means to be alive, by breathing into my insides.
I will show you
what it means to be alive, by breathing into my insides.
Life is not a
capsule of a one or a two; but a grand universe unfolding anew
Not a
strawberry-sized town or a New Orleans birthplace to bound
Assumptions or
resignations; no white flags; caring about more than the obvious
Spring is but the
urge to retort the sun with self-permission for our seed to grow
So know; every
day I die and am born; saved a thousand times more
Hitchhiking in
the highway of your eyes, thumbs up to confide
I will never
resign, lest I douse those delivery room cries
You call out to
me in my sleep; in a triad with two other memories
A cacophony of
rationed choices; blindness, sadness, and presence
Lovingly yelling
at me to live in the tones that somewhere is home
Ulysses, go find
it, sail seas and combine
The choices of
men with the urge to amend by simply living
Within the oceans
of volition, free-will honest promises
Trade-winds,
beaches, islands, hurricane speeches
Of why this, why
that; rowing on despite the wind
In the motion of
these arms; I attempt to give the world to each of us
*From the Avett
Brothers, “A Father’s First Spring”
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