Ch 11 part 2 – An Avalanche in Antarctica

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Chapter Eleven – An Avalanche in Antarctica part 2

336

My parent’s and Tim came by in the afternoon after spending Christmas lunch at Grandpa Kurt’s house.  They sat in a row on the sofa near the French doors staring at me from the opposite side of the room.  My father Timothy said, “You should hire a private investigator.”  Tim said, “I always thought she was fake.”  My mother Sara hugged me.  My mom told me she got our Christmas card in the mail on Monday the fifteenth. 

They all seemed to think Ashley must be having an affair and I was too blind to see it.  I did not want to believe that, but it did make more sense than many other justifications.  However, my tendency to see my own fraudulent inability to relate to people in this world as the primary self-perpetuating crux of this matter was a difficult hurdle.

337

A few days after Christmas, I called Hilton and invited him to talk.  My wife and my daughter were in this man’s home.  I was alone in this grotesque-framed crab-shell.  Hilton came with Lacey.  I conveyed my shock, non-understanding, sadness, and want of a repair.  I ultimately succumbed to the naïve stretch of my crumble-boned hand in attempt to touch either of them on the shoulder for a moment of clarity. 

I read the Hingle’s a pre-written set of paragraphs scribbled in a notebook to hold my composure. 

I asked to meet with you to offer my side for how this will be affecting Penelope’s life.  I am comforted that right now Penelope can be in a non-confrontational environment that she feels like home in to try to help her through this.  I love Penelope with my whole heart. 

Regarding Ashley and me, on December fifteenth, Ashley told me she does not love me or want to live with me.  She asked me to leave.  I have always loved Ashley.  I have never cheated on her.  I never hit her.  I have never lied to Ashley in my life.  I do not even think we argued a lot.  In our marriage, I have typically been the one to facilitate communication.  I am the one who wants to talk things out and this experience has been no exception.

Ashley is escalating the time line towards one thing: the removal of me from her life.  Ashley has told me that she does not have any hope for us.  From the moment Ashley started down this path I think her mind was completely decided.

Ashley’s explanations are that I was not a confidant enough person.  I am too principled.  This hampered her social interaction with friends and family.  I have never tried to keep Ashley away from you.  If anything I encouraged our move to Nottoway for Ashley’s happiness.  For my role, I am sorry.

However, I do not believe that this is the root of why Ashley is taking such drastic action in the time frame in which she is choosing to conduct this change.  I am not perfect.  I believe in love we work with our partner towards our bond; especially when there is an innocent four-year-old girl in the equation. 

I ask myself after almost nine years of marriage, why now?  Why after Arthur Andersen, Enron, Katrina, Dallas, and the process of building our home, why when everything seems to be settled, Ashley would decide to run out on her family?

I think possibly some point while we were building this house Ashley began an affair that escalated into the decision to leave me the weekend before the fifteenth. Ashley is pressuring me to leave the house.  Ashley is threatening to divest our financial accounts and to quit paying any portion of the mortgage.

I have offered to live in the garage, to sleep shower and eat in the room back there, while Ashley and Penelope could live in the house while we try to either work this out through counseling or transition into what our new lives will become in order to ease the pressure on Penelope and on the financial issues involved.  Ashley has refused.

Ashley is claiming that she is already tired of living in your home and that she and Penelope need to either get an apartment or for me to leave completely and Ashley live here. 

I am processing the saddest cataclysm in my life.  I saw an eerie side of Ashley on Christmas morning in front of Penelope.  I realize the life I had with Ashley is gone. 

I respect you to use your own judgment to help Penelope throughout her life.  I offer my word that in no potential outcome will I try to prevent you from being involved in Penelope’s life.  I implore you to let her know she is loved, because as much as it saddens me to say this, the two of you may have the privilege to be more of her day to day life growing up then I will. 

That is the part of all of this that I probably will not get to be there to see her grow up each day, that truly breaks my heart.  Thank you so much for all you have done for me.  Ethan

Hilton did not say a word.  Lacey cried.  I could see a line painted in blood on the frame close as the two of them shut the side porch Dutch door to exit.  I was never family.  I was just some stupid city mother fucker talking trash about their daughter who deserved what ever had come and was coming. 

338

I was inside total reevaluation.  I needed to move away from Ashley and Nottoway.  I will not progress nor survive here.  My old life is dead.  What is fair to Penelope?  Friday, Saturday, Sunday during the day, a weekend dad, is that what we get?  I don’t get to see Penelope grow.  Ashley has dibs.  Penelope needs her mother more.  Ashley has a support structure here of parents, a brother, friends.  I am just one man, a web-cam dad.

                                                   

I was lost.  I wanted to talk to Penelope about what was going on in an age appropriate manner.  I wanted to reassure her.  Ashley kept pushing off any scheduled time.  I eventually realized Ashley had already told Penelope what Ashley had to say.  I was still in the fantasy Eden of co-parenting.   

339

The next En Christo Counseling appointment took two weeks because of New Years.  I pent my squall.  I still had a spider-web strand of hope that we could use this counseling opportunity to gestate some seed for later catharsis.

In a less dire situation I probably would have found a different counselor.  There are two counselors in Nottoway.  The other was Ashley’s friend 

I brought my list and intentions.  Dr. Akins let me read the titles.  It was like the elephant of Ashley rampaged off.  The pachyderm was ignored.  We talked about my teeth accident and a past long since my graduation dates.  The real ivory-tusked issues were about our marriage.  By the end of the fifty minutes, I was confused if anything in this red queen court was helpful. 

I wrote.  Writing was my blowout preventer. Communication with Ashley was a clogged toilet.  I called Dr. Akins.  I dropped off a few pages for him to read.  I felt like the time to apply marital CPR was running out if not gone. 

Dr. Akins did not read what I wrote in a septet of days.  Dr. Akins said he was too busy.  I promised to compensate him for his time to read the twelve pages.  I needed his aid.  I could not even pay someone one-hundred dollars an hour to listen to me.

I showed up a week later.  I was half-crying and told Ashley, “Have a damn feeling, this is me.  I am still your husband.  I am hurting and you sit there like you can not wait to get back to work.  My whole life is falling apart and you are worried about some report.”  

For me, it was like a boy staring up at the circus trapeze artists flipping through the sky.  The man’s hands slipped through the clutch.  His head thumped the ground.  All the crowd did was clap. 

I knew marriage was over.  Duality ceased before I ever sat down on that porch to hear Ashley’s words.  Dr. Akins called to reschedule the next appointment.  I declined continuance.  Ashley never asked me about the cancellation. 

340

About a week later I met Ashley for lunch at Nottoway’s Mexican restaurant.  We talked about remaining positive for a friendly on-going relationship for us and Penelope.  We had to decide how to split-up our property and assets and a custody schedule. 

Penelope was four-and-a-half.  Penelope could not go a week without seeing either of us.  Maybe when Penelope was older Ashley and I could trade weeks.  My first suggestion was for Penelope and I to have Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday and Ashley to have Penelope the other four days. I wanted to have a commensurate presence in Penelope’s life for quality time to be possible. 

Ashley would not commit or suggest anything.  This whole upheaval was Ashley’s idea, but it was up to me to figure out what was acceptable to Ashley.  Ashley was an absent voter exempt from scrutiny. 

After having a cheese enchilada lunch with some woman that was clearly no longer my wife, I told Ashley, “Let me go first, this time I am leaving you.”  I wanted some measure of volition in this extirpation.  I went out to my car and took off my wedding ring.  I have never worn the simple gold band since.

341

I saw the first invoices from Ashley’s lawyers in the mail in mid-January.  Postal forwarding was still one of the quirks.  I gave Ashley the first letter. Ashley chuckled that her friend Melanie billed her for that.  Divorce papers came on January twenty-ninth from a second attorney.  

I needed a lawyer for the first time in my life.  I needed to retain my own monster.  The only lawyer I knew was my friend Justin’s father in New Orleans.  He recommended a Mr. Patrick McCarron.  Patrick was a “do you want me to get that bitch” sort of attorney, wrinkled and ready and way past this “hearts are involved bullshit.”  Mr. McCarron tried to slap my face like Rocky Balboa’s trainer Mickey Goldmill. 

McCarron had the wisdom of age, cantankerous, grizzled and battle-worn.  I needed to get my gloves up for the ring.  Mr. McCarron asked what we were dealing with; I seemed to be a good father and this was the kind of case we should be able to file some papers and move on.  Ashley and I were both CPA’s and could sort out the property.  Neither party wanted child support.  Patrick could handle the paperwork.

342

I was done with the bargaining stage of this grief.  I was plowing through to the acceptance stage.  I set up to have Penelope at the house with me on Tuesdays and Saturdays.  We played parades of tiny animals and dress up charades. 

I still took Penelope to the library every Tuesday.  We got a bag full of books.  Penelope immersed.  I knew I had to stay in Nottoway.  I had to be able to bring Penelope to school to be part of her daily life.  I had brought Penelope to school and fixed her breakfast pretty much everyday since Penelope was one-and-a-half in Dallas.  I was not going to just be a weekend dad.  We were a family despite her mother’s choice.  I could not allow my choices to take away Penelope’s father. 

Initially I felt infinitely feeble.  Could I stand living in or near Nottoway?  The reminders were shrapnel.  I thought about moving to New Orleans, back to Dallas or a novel playground like Raleigh.  I knew I could blend in Dallas or NOLA, but I could not allow Penelope to be the greatest victim. 

Ashley was and I am sure still is, a great mother for Penelope.  I know that there are things that God brought me to Penelope to show and teach her that her mother simply can not provide.  If I abandoned Penelope then I would be sad for missing Penelope and she would not have the quality of love that she deserved in such disbursed encounters.  The choice was clear.  As soon as Penelope and I spent a couple of days together just her and I, there was never a doubt about where I was supposed to be. 

                                                                                343

I bedded down in work.  The walls of the voided de-homed house pounded a Verdi anvil-chorus relegating me to question every nail hammered into each four-by-four in its reinforced lumber.  Each plank of that porch was like a drunken man looking at an extra $90,000 bar tab at the end of the night on a $640,000 bender.  Who gets the gratuity? 

Besotted and crapulent this inebriated carousel was coming to halt.  I needed to climb off this Pegasus-unicorn elevating steed.  The children were scurrying to find open seats on bobbing horses.  I was stuck dizzy in a blender expectorating blood in the parking lot.

I rambled alone in that house.  Where is Penelope sleeping tonight?  Do they wish Penelope felt the pea?  Load her up with bribed troves of McDonalds’ merry go round alamode.  Play place the attention in hordes.  Cement a fresh-family to mention as reference for scripted court documents.  Testify to a maternal jurisdiction of Division F of a Louisiana breech.  Catholic contracts have no dominion here.

Ashley purchased an entirely new wardrobe on our credit card to replace the legion of clothes she left untouched in her drive-in nine-rack closet.  I offered to bring Ashley her clothes or to be absent during her planned retrieval.  I left a note asking what I could do, what I could bring if she would simply make a selection.  Ashley never came.

I had fake problems, generally relegated to western world affluence.  A giant closet, credit card bills, and a high-carb mortgage: humans don’t worry about that shit in Zambia.  Hell, some French Quarter Bistro line cook grills $50 steaks to watch the filets come back with one bite missing and the trash gets the lion’s share.  He packs his $10 an hour to a food pantry and a heart medication he can’t afford.  Man splits the Plavix dosage to make the payments last.  Food, bullets, poverty: fuck my self-pity.  I resented myself for my choices to get in this quagmire.  This was white-vomit.

This house, divorce would pass.  This was like spilling wine on a daycare application or having to walk upstairs to use the bathroom.  This was complaining about the maid, parking space for a wave runner, the latency of a drink cart on a golf course, harassment at a beauty pageant, the location of season tickets, the resolution on a 100 inch projection television, a wine pairing, or the difficulty of yoga.  The physical and monetary consequences were trivial.  Emotional scars were transcendently pernicious to bypass artificial stress for inter-tax bracket human ache. 

344

Removing all the accoutrements and trinkets of my life that were invariably linked to my former spouse was like trying to extricate cancer from my body with a teaspoon.  How could I obtain a healthy self when so many organs and pounds of flesh assumed vital were now more detrimental than beneficial to my survival?  (In Christ we are betrothed in one body.) 

Some days I stared at my breakfast cereal spoon like a suicidal man staring at the gun or the noose or the bottle of pills, but this quasi-body had already been shot, asphyxiated and drugged.  The self-metal in the Kashi blueberry cluster medicine spoon was swallowing the images of everything our body was ever supposed to grow to be.  Let it die down in my gullet.  Let the acids corrode the thought into a rusted oxidization.

I told myself to take that blunt vexing spoon-edge and assault my skin in a civil war.  Dermis be dammed.  Endocrine be eviscerated.  Clump it all out with a dumb tongue and blindfolded eyes.  That was breakfast.

Do not complain.  Do not call before the cock crows.  Apportion the seed.  Stand a man that was buried alive in an unmarked grave; a self poisoned to a foul serpent-tongued Juliet.  House of Capulet convinced me these spare body parts no longer needed to exist. 

All these revolting organs were pumping blood and enzymes for half of a non-reciprocal love.  This body lied both dead and alive in a mummy wraparound porch sarcophagus.  Our zombie-self rose with my metronome daily inputs churning half-blood and half-oxygen in a morbid Siamese corpse of a marriage. 

My God-less Catholic eye was blind to the quarters of abandoned maintenance of Ashley’s hemisphere.  Her half became an atrophied mass of gangrenous limbs, rigor mortis muscles and osteoporosis hollow-marrow bones.  I begged myself to scrape this married body out of me. 

Damn the photographs, the sentences I can no longer say.  Plead with Nietzsche that “I am not upset that she lied, but that now I could no longer believe her.”  Rise a man.  Reclaim the parts of me I disowned to claim Ashley as my own in this Christian One.   My life was just a snuff-film on a jumbotron at a tractor pull.  Eat, shit, masturbate, brush teeth, piss, sleep, work; that is how I’ll survive.  Eat, shit, masturbate, brush teeth, piss, sleep, work; that is how I’ll survive.

345

I was trying to learn how to fix Penelope’s hair as if my brash fingers were plump with estrogen.  The day I fixed pig tails with these polar bear and penguin loop-holder hair contraptions, I felt like I understood physics.  I could build ships in bottles or deliver infants despite maladroit testosterone-phalanges.

I made dinners guaranteed to prompt four-year old revolt trying to balance nutrition.  I had this civil war of sugar, trying not to overcompensate through spoiling.  I wanted to be the rational one, balance to a normal between dueling broccoli and chicken nuggets. 

Penelope would cling.  If I had to take a shit, she wanted to watch me crap.  If she had to dump, I was invited to the ball.

One day when Penelope and I were driving to the library, Penelope chatted in her booster seat about wishes.  Penelope said, “Do you know what wish I have daddy?  I wish you and mommy weren’t separated.”  Days like that reaffirmed just how broken I was and how Penelope lived in her America.

I wanted to agree to some form of permanent custody schedule for the three of us.  Penelope and I deserved predictability.  Getting Ashley to communicate on any level was like trying to catch eye lashes from a camel.

346

In early February, I disassembled the Voltron Christmas tree in thirty pieces.  I almost plummeted off the ladder to get the top by myself.  I made a sign of the cross as I caught myself without tearing a ligament.  I stuffed the fir-blob into the entrails of the attic past the clear-covered sarcophagus of Ashley’s air-compressed wedding dress. 

Holiday season had to end.  I could not keep staring at so much Yule.  For weeks I contemplated leaving the hulking metal Cringle-trunk in the foyer for Ashley to take down after her inevitable reentry.  I realized Hilton and Jeffery would just end up doing it.  Satisfaction was a ghost even in my daydreams.  Fuck it.  I packed that tower down, no burnings, just cardboard decorum.

347

In mid February 2009, Ashley agreed to meet me at our house.  Ashley wanted to consult Google for an optimal custody schedule.  I felt Penelope deserved time with each of her parents on some weekdays and weekends.

Ashley arrived and gathered papers for Clay Robertson’s Chief of Police filing reports.  Ashley packed swimming clothes to jet off to a vacation with Penelope, Hilton and Lacey to the Dominican Republic.  Ashley had not even mentioned she was taking Penelope out of the country.  My fatherly authority was now internationally defunct as well.

Ashley scuttled around the house in-need of Penelope’s passport.  Ashley asked, “Do you have the key to the fire-safe box.”  I told her, “Yes I do”.  Ashley did not ask me to open the chest for her, nor would she have asked in some parallel reality extension of the world we lived in three months before. 

Ashley finally sat down and had nothing prepared, “So what do you want to talk about?”  Ashley might as well been in a high school hallway asking me “What’s up?”  Ashley blabbered out her inquiry innocuously, as if we were sitting down on any other Sunday, as if I had not been waiting over a week to get a response on Penelope’s custody. 

Ashley was suing me for divorce and had filed for a court date.  If we did not agree on a schedule, we would have to leave it up to a judge.  Ashley finally started talking.  Ashley agreed to change the Saturday/Sunday split to exchange custody every other weekend.  However Ashley felt that me having Penelope for even one day during the week was a concession.  Ashley felt that she should have Penelope twenty-four out of every twenty-eight days. 

Ashley was informing me I was less of my daughter’s parent.  Fathers are not mothers.  Our court date was set for March 30, 2009. 

348

On Mardi Gras day, I picked Penelope up after work. . Penelope returned the day before from the Dominican Republic.  When Penelope saw me she burst into conversation about bongo drums and two wooden parrots.  Penelope talked for twenty “no gap in the train” minutes about the trip.  We had an upstairs mini-parade.  I played the Native American flute I got for Penelope in New Mexico.  We wore hats and acted out Sleeping Beauty. 

I prayed to forget the compulsion to care for Ashley’s safety.  I was a gnat drawn under a lampshade praying for appendages to turn off her light.  I began to realize the very compartments of me capable of excavating the words to survive, were the buried burs that Ashley could not fathom remaining married to. 

349

I needed to ready my blows for war.  Ashley was rounding the coast.  Court was coming.  My ship was idle like a duck caught waddling with out feet or wings, bobbing for torment and swallowing swill.  Ashley’s cannons were raised to finish what would preserve her exit and lily-white gown as my city was in cinders.  I never asked for an enemy.  I needed help.

Mr. McCarran was contacted by Ashley’s attorney Ms. Tracey Trunchbull, the assistant district attorney in charge of domestic abuse.  Mr. McCarran knew he was outside the lines of his jurisdiction.  This was no longer a file-by-paper-airplane case.  If I was in Orleans, Ashley’s ass may have been cooked, but out in Osceola Parish. Mr. McCarran was without naval support.  Patrick found a local attorney, for me, Mrs. Martha Bertrand. 

Martha was a sea lion of a woman.  Girthed in knowledge, a Brillo-haired let’s get to the point and solve this methodically sort of creature.  Martha taught me court is not about what this is, but what it appears to be.  Mrs. Bertrand graduated from Tulane law and was originally from New Orleans and landed out here by marriage.  There was hope. 

I organized as much as I could on my own case.  I gathered documentation.  I whetted my capabilities.  I assembled financial logistics.  I tried to hone in on the only things a court is allowed to consider.  My lawyer taught me to perceive the court as a boxed-mind of a computer operating system.  There is a FORTRAN language of analysis that can only utilize specific aspects of evidential matter presented in a custody case.  Circumstantial emotions be damned.

350

March 4, 2009, Penelope's school was closed for open house.  I brought Penelope to Lacey’s home to stay for the day.  I informed Lacey I would be picking up Penelope after work.  Penelope and I had plans to finish an animal parade with Penelope’s barnyard and safari figurines.  I made a commitment.  Ashley sent me the following passive-aggressive “take the pill like Nurse Ratched says” email at ten a.m.

Ethan,

My mother told me that when you dropped Penelope off this morning, you told her you would be picking up Penelope tonight (Wed).  This is not what is best for Penelope and will disrupt her schedule; therefore, we will continue the original Tuesday and every other weekend schedule that we had previously agreed to and have maintained for the last few months.  If you have any issue with this, please have your attorney contact my attorney.  Thank you. Ashley 

That afternoon I rang the doorbell.  Hilton was the only one home.  I expressed my intent to try to talk with Ashley.  Hilton invited me to the driveway to talk after he grabbed his cigarettes.  Lacey drove up in her ride-high Ford Expedition with Penelope.  I expressed to Hilton that I came because I promised Penelope.  Ashley would not answer my calls. 

Five minutes later, Ashley arrived home.  After seeing Ashley I tried to tell Penelope that I was going to go.  Ashley and I tried to have a private discussion, but Penelope was naturally clinging to us and saying, "Mommy, Daddy every other day, Mommy, Daddy and Innie-Meenie-Miny-Moe." 

I told Ashley, “I do not want to have this conversation in front of Penelope.  I should have driven away.  I tried to give Ashley the option to take Penelope inside.  Ashley was so concerned with not using legally-incriminating words like, “I am taking Penelope and you can’t have her” or just physically taking Penelope. 

I was not helping by saying, “So are you keeping me from seeing my daughter?” Ashley twisted the gender, “Are you keeping me from mine?” If I did not stand up for our family now, my legal legs would atrophy.

Ashley kept reiterating to maintain Penelope’s schedule.  As if this apportionment of time that occurred in the rockslide of Ashley’s decision that I did not immediately object to while I was pulling my armpit out from under the boulder of her departure was some how an abdication of my say and an endorsement of a status-quo.  Ashley asserted her jurisdiction in a manner that as long as I did not force Penelope in the middle Ashley did not have to be overt.  Ashley kept using words like precedent.  

Penelope went inside with her grandparents.  Ashley said, “You agreed to the schedule.”  I wanted a chance to sort my life out and get off the mat.  We had no schedule.  We had a childhood recess game of, “but I didn’t say Ashley says.”  Standing in that driveway, I felt useless, incapable to manage my life, let alone be a single father, but showing fear was hemoglobin for the shark.

351

Penelope ran out the never-locked side door.  There were no sticks to wave.  Lacey stood as if helpless to watch her granddaughter escape after two minutes.  As if the phone Ashley refused to answer, the email Ashley refused to send, and every word out my mouth that Ashley let drift into oblivion were all beyond Hingle-control.

I was on the concrete drive to the house I was stationed in for two years to try to eek out some sort of discourse on my fallen Jenga-tower of a life.  Penelope started to finger, “Innie-Meenie-Miny-Moe.”  The situation deteriorated; both of us should have done a better job to de-escalate.  Penelope was caught in the unfair jelly.  Ashley flinched towards the house.  Penelope cried.  I remained silent for a cluster of seconds.  I knew any outward expression was under surveillance.

Ashley and her parents were passive-aggressive spitting in my face to get me to react.  If I flinched Ashley would retort with a, “Who, poor me?  Me. How dare you.  I only do what is best for my daughter.”

Penelope spoke up and referred to our parade we were supposed to finish.  Ashley made six steps towards Hilton’s house.  Penelope started crying and immediately called out for Ashley.  Penelope’s head rotated like a three-hundred-sixty degree neck radius owlet viewing mother and father.  Like any bird Penelope instinctually chased the creature running away.  Ashley carried out the passive play coached by the best.  Hilton’s egg had hatched well.  I was trapped between my Chevrolet Impala and the hen owl lifting her wing to offer protection.

352

Ashley started hugging all over Penelope.  I was immobilized trying to find an out.  Penelope started saying, “but I have to go to the parade.”  I told Penelope, “It’s ok.  Daddy was just coming to see if you wanted to come play safari because I promised we would.  You don’t have to come.  You can stay here with mommy.” 

Ashley swooped up Penelope.  The words parade or safari might as well have been Mandarin or Swahili, because they did not register with Ashley.  If they did it probably sounded like Ricin or lick dog shit, or reading together from the misogynist handbook for young fathers. 

I was trying to defuse the wired environment.  At that point I wanted Penelope to stay there because of the emotional drama.  Ashley said, “Don’t ask her to choose.”  Ashley insisted, “No, you have to go with your father.”  Ashley maintained a convinced sense of external nexus of control transferred onto me.  Ashley’s words boomeranged around the drive like mosquitoes on dive bombing runs trying to irritate my skin until I left or created a courtroom diorama Ashley could show to win her blue ribbon from the judge. 

Ashley told Penelope, “You are going to go with daddy tonight.”  Penelope did not want to leave.  Ashley stroked Penelope’s hair and cheeks to calm her.  Penelope was frightened.  I could sense the tension in the air like the way a young blind mammal can detect its mother’s nipple by pheromones and temperature variances.  Penelope started crying. I prostrated myself trying not to make the pit worse.  I said, “Don’t do this,” but I kept my distance. 

Ashley cast me as some monster in the woods, like the Rugaroo my father’s swamp ancestor’s use to tell my grandfather, who told my father about the swamp monster stealing children in the night.  Cajun country myth-tales told and I am how old, wanting to take my daughter to her own home to finish a parade with giraffes and pigs, elephants and ducks on top of a blue toy truck pulled over a rug and around two sofas.  Is this request such a travesty of justice to create all of this for an opportunity to battle the validity of precedents?  The first sentence to the definition to divorce had formed.

353

Ashley buckled Penelope into my car seat, ragged me about the strap set up and then closed the door.  Penelope burst into tears again.  I was not sure what to do.  I did not want to unbuckle my daughter and replay the scene.

I walked by Ashley and said, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”  Ashley stood there like a fallen saint shackled back by the chains of some non-free-willed devil pinning back her arms.  Ashley panted in a staring contest at the front of my car.  Dusk fell into darkness.

I sat in the driver’s seat.  I cranked the engine with the headlights pointed at Hilton’s face.  Hilton had exited the house at the swell in commotion.  I looked back at Penelope’s scared face and stopped.  Hilton raised his hands up in the air.  I could see him mouth, “What the fuck is going on?” 

I pointed at Ashley.  I looked back at Penelope.  I paused for a second of what is best.  What is best here?  I held the wheel in one hand, pressured in every direction.  My own daughter, my whatever she is now wife, her father, his driveway, my I do not want to look at it house two blocks away, Ashley’s lawyer: this Nottoway life was swarming.  The turn in my neck was red!

I stopped and said, “I am not playing this game.  I am not doing this.”  I cut the engine.  I thought to myself, “Driving away with Penelope would be giving Ashley exactly what she wants.  Penelope does not deserve this.”  I picked Penelope up and gave her a hug and said, “I love you.  It’s ok.  It’s ok.  Daddy is here.  You can go with mommy.”

I told Penelope goodbye.  Penelope quit crying after I brought her to her mother.  Hilton stared at me like I was a shit-crusted asshole on an ocelot.  I got in my car, pulled slowly out the driveway feeling like I was right on that verge, but my cheek turned. 

354

Five days passed.  I picked up Penelope from Hilton’s house again.  The exchange was amicable.  I asked Ashley for a copy of the house appraisal she got that we paid for.  I might as well have been asking for bread in Paris.  Penelope offered me flowers she picked from the lawn.  Penelope said, “To make you happy so you and mommy can live back together again.” 

I attempted to inform Lacey that I would be picking up Penelope on Friday after Ashley and I talked for a minute.  Upon my verbalization Ashley reverted in new-found rebuttal that she thought our attorney's needed to talk about this.  In order to avoid any conflict and de-escalate any potential situation in front of Penelope I acquiesced to pick up Penelope on Saturday rather than Friday afternoon and allow the proper legal channels to make the decision.  My life was now in the coat pockets of other women; Ashley, Penelope, lawyers, a female judge.

355

At home Penelope and I drew stick-figures and cut out J.C. Penny catalog clothes.  We glued the clothes over pencil bodies on printer paper.  We made fried shrimp.  Penelope dipped the crustaceans in batter.  I handled the rest.  We played Jumpstart Kindergarten on the computer and made a construction paper snake.  

On March 30, 2009, we sat in Judge Cynthia Wolfe’s court.  The hearing was for nine a.m.  The first hour Martha was missing.  I thought I would have to speak for myself, but we were never seen.  Ashley came in a lurid wan power suit, accompanied by Hilton and Lacey stone-faced in between smoke breaks.  No one looked at anyone.  We sat there for hours ready and yet not capable of doing anything but see other human stories of alcohol, absentee parents, and arguments over what it meant to be supported. 

Ashley’s fangs were out under her lips seething.  No biting in broad daylight.  Transformation would come in little holes in the neck of the body my daughter use to inhabit, in the tastes of coagulated fluids Penelope preferred.  Blood lines were drawn. 

At the end of the day in the atrium Martha told me that Ms. Trunchbull informed her that Hilton was going to help Ashley buy me out of the house.  I was relieved.  The threat of having to pay for half of that house while having to rent another house just to avoid the full mammoth-mortgage hung over my throat like Damocles.  The monetary implications were far sharper and perilous than the Katrina-house mortgage. 

Ashley was determined to dictate what she deemed best.  I could see Ashley’s self-appointed righteous high-ground in every non-look.  Our case was postponed until the end of June.  Three more months of purgatory was assured. 

356

The next Saturday night I took Penelope out for pizza.  Penelope told me at four and a half that mommy and daddy were going to live in different places and that was ok.  Penelope deserved the veil of childhood.  I could seppuku by remaining here.  Maybe there was room for a hybrid breath.  Maybe this Nottoway cornucopia of potato options could exist along side my New Orleans plate of oyster dressing. 

Some days I would walk around with one of my shoes untied all day, not to get anyone to notice, but because, “What is the fucking point?”  Babies do not have to learn how to take in that first breath.  Sometimes there is no time for advice or guidance.  There is only doing, reaction, mandatory for survival.  I had to walk.  I had to breathe.  No stalling.  Eat, shit, masturbate, brush teeth, piss, sleep, work, repeat.  Parent in the overlay.

Sometimes I thought this was the house with the mold.  The walls appeared littered with black specks like on the bottom of an abandoned yogurt cup.  The bacteria were in civil war.  What was once saved for sweetness had returned to its natural biological state, spread out in dampness, clawed on the bottom of life’s deposits in strife. 

I pondered how Ashley and I broke.  How had we landed on this lunar canyon of blood?  This imperfect natural satellite was cantankerous and mountainous.  Neither of us could remember.  Maybe I had ignored some side of this moon.  Where did Ashley explore when the Earth cast its shadow?

Ashley could hide in the taken for granted part of my family.  I always trusted Ashley loved me.  Despite water in streets, we walked on stilts or swam through gasoline.  We might fail to be perfect, but my gravity was always Ashley.

I thought I knew Ashley without one book left.  I read her volumes.  I breached her indices.  I lived her library even the occult stuff that Ashley feared anyone read. 

I now knew Ashley never wanted to be my wife.  Ashley was a mannequin up on a window for professional display.  I betrothed a store-bought posture for years of telling me what I wanted to hear to teach me the lesson that, trust should be reciprocated.  Love is not a gratuity.

Ashley had two tales and two tongues, but some how Ashley would rather use neither one to sell me an explanation.  Ashley preferred to hide behind doorways of people with bound allegiance absent of independent judgment.  Survey says there must be a victim.

357

I had so many questions for Ashley that I knew I would never be able to ask, let alone procure answers.  I wrote scrolls of inquiries knowing the futility of such one-way interrogatives, but writing to myself helped me clear the desk in my head.

What happened to altar vows on a street car line?  Rain cancelation on a scalped counterfeit ticket sacrament asking, how can I communicate with the driver before the deer is pan-caked and split with guts and the nits of lice buried unearthing out skin with blood from the forest exploding on pavement into a grill?

Couldn’t you have enlightened me before we built a castle, a porch-mansion monster to get out of the rain?  Why seek shelter in my arms?  You longed to walk out on this journey, but you dared not to talk of it.

We committed to mortar your dream home.  Before all this started, you wanted to go?  The record needle lifted, silence screeching.  You want my daughter, my wife.  You have all of my love under your foot.

Puncturing with your pitchfork, how could you not see the better part of me begging to assist to give you a hand to get up the step you appear to have missed?

How can I show you a path where you do not get to lead?  How can you trust a man, who is not your father, your so perfect dad, to be superman with no cape and a drink in his hand? 

All I ever wanted was to have someone accept me for me in the form of my wife.  Pride, pride, pride buried alive in the belly of the pig bashing inside like a warthog rumpus bobbing and spitting.  Imagine if the outcome of these scars appeared like a listing of secret done deeds across your face.  Your pride has prevented you from recognizing their place right in your hand held the whole time that you were the one committing these crimes.

Blood on the door and blame it on me, doesn’t that sound better in your own private symphony?  Just one chord to play, one instrument strewn, to champion your own song everywhere outside our living room.  To play without pause or chance of confusion that the spell has been cast on with the illusion that you were the victim in some horrible game, as if you were not pretending to save your own child to absolve your own blame.

Is there any part lower that you could bend down to reach?  Maybe if snakes had belly buttons we could find a new crevice to sweep.  The shock has subsided.  I am starting to stand I will be here for her and build my new land where I do not need you to help me exist.  I can be me without all your fits and needs to comply for I do not need a porch of such size.

I see what they say and beg to confirm that all of their words appease my concerns that I am not good enough to hold my position, because I never needed them to listen to my conjecture to ascertain that I was important. 

If I wanted to I could lecture that you no longer felt petty or silent or small in the walls of my soul cramped down in the hall with your black and white squares and polka-dot frames that you are no longer the girl who hides all her pains that she was unworthy and guilty and filthy for all of her acts she did and regrets the drugs the sex and requests to forget.

All of it rationalized, all of it fixed, I held you.  I bathed you awash in my love, to tell you it did not matter and shove all those thoughts right out of your mind, but some how I know you have kept them lurking inside.  As you break and tear away in this mess, how hard it will be for you to ever forget. 

They will bubble and surface and bare out to be a bane on your pursuits like a hell to flee.  Those thoughts have new friends in which to confide a marriage abandoned and a child pushed aside.  Your pride will get choked off in the flood and then you will see the true acts that your gall has done.

They will not seem so clean without your pride to spit on the shine, the arrogance to rationalize.  You have hurt Penelope.  The old you would never have known, but watch how the truth sprouts when she has grown into a young woman strong and resourceful.  She will look to you for honesty and all she got was a morsel of truth wrapped in bacon of your own brochette of concern.

Think what she will do once she has learned, that you kicked-out and spat-out and abandoned her father, kept her held captive under DVD’s and six forms of kisses.  Well bunny rabbits wear off.  So do the dishes you went out to eat and never sat down to cook her.  Dodge a real conversation held over dinner or breakfast.  You kept on working and left her questions in-between like crumbs to be dealt with later in the crevices.

An Oma and spoiling and pure adulation when she wanted a family, that you had to bash in to pieces and run out the door, making up lies to get her to adore your every move and cling to your hand when that independent woman grows up to stand on her high-heels and seek out a life that does not always include you because she wants to be somebody’s wife?

What lessons have you taught her?  How will she fare when you have weighed her down with only one way to care?  Your priorities are jumbled.  When she has a true love in her heart, will you teach her to kill it to return back to her start?

To value you above him, her children above her husband, what Lacey jar is this for you to deposit her love in?  Why was it so hard for you to understand that I love her just as much as you do, but I do not need a road sign to demand, everyone’s attention

To give me a plaque for father of the year, I can just look in her eyes and show her I am here.  I put you first in my world and had confidence in that because I believed in my daughter to grow in fact, live her life on her own , for it is a given I will be there and love her more than she could know

You had to press it, you had to obsess it, you just could never hold back, shoving your days into one suitcase packed.  You ply and you tell me just where to stay, to dictate the schedule and rules we shall play.  You use my love like a pawn in your game.  How can this be fair? Where is your shame?  Buried under all of your pride, claiming to do what is best for her, to lie.

I was not even asking for every second or minute, not even half and you had to dismiss it, as piddling as meaningless to her exigent development, that you could coordinate her life’s establishment of her home, her faith, and her words and I would be a side-order to fill in the swerves.

On the road of mandated paternal percentages two nights a month, is all you would allow, as if I was just a yield sign on a roadway or a passing glance into a pasture fencing a cow.  Well bring me to slaughter, triangle and yell for the call to the butcher is foaming to tell me how to end my life as I know it. 

The child I have raised with you, the child I have loved is somehow just yours, all I can be is a byproduct sold in a store, Pre-packaged daddy next to the beef.  Why won’t you face me? Why won’t you meet the consequences of your actions?

Like the registered fractions you are so meant to sell, that all of this is for her, no matter how anyone tells the end result is subversive drunk in its plan, to take over our house and thrust out the man and his life. 

I was just trying to be, your husband her father and all I could see was the next fifty years, hands-held on a porch watching her siblings and offspring grow running in the backyard.  Generations unfold like flowers on the field beautiful in a rainbow of my everything: you, her and them who will never exist.

Hell-bent on winning and proving you are right, spiting your face off to exit despite knowing I will love her, knowing I care.  Making off that yours is the only one that counts is so far from fair that you will take away six months to a year all out of arrogance to not show your peers who you really are, a traitor turned to a life on a tangent.

Back there in Hingle-land where all is so chummy where no one can address a real issue as it is coming.  Just swept under the magical rug of cat hair and germs for all those lessons we do not have the patience to learn.

A girl scrubbing dishes until the gleam could earn his praise, the threat of a tantrum, plates into pieces.  Sweet-pea sweeps up to iron in the creases in her jumper and look perfect for him.  Step into line to avoid the consequence and the sins of angering Auga. 

The king in his castle threatening to leave, Hilton imprinted his princess and his rascal to behave and to act, to jump just as high on demand for there was only one word in Hingle-land.

You and your parent’s have dubbed me the tyrant in role, the man of Ashley’s life that kept her under my control.  How much projection of your own childhood to our life and now you have run off claiming I have mandated the path of my wife like a possession, meant to feel as I say, but how can this be when I have done nothing but try to please you every step of the way?

From day one I fought for our love, written you sonnets and thoughts that come from the meat of my soul to feed you to give you a human devoted in role when you would doubt yourself, when you would run crying in your net a ruined sum

From any hope of a lasting love, I spoke to you in tenderness, in friendship and touch, to come to a place where we could be an us.  I felt we were paired in complement in frayed ends and knee scars to tie knots and raise our bars of what our lives could be.  I made it so facile to offer you apples from a giving tree.

You never had to grow, the prize of someone else’s lifetime.  I gave away for free.  My biggest error all mapped out, cartographer gone missing to route faith that we would make it across any ocean. 

No matter the hurricane or ruptured explosions of hitting booby traps of a marriage to blow it off course, lay-offs and job-shifts, renovating homes and ripped off roofs, rebuilding remnants, and paying for mortgages on homes abandoned.

Seeing an Armageddon of laundry baskets full of legal files and questionable gas tanks, if we could make the miles in this post-apocalyptic crescent land to get back to our temporary home base, phone calls on cell phones dotting the country, weeks thinking out Gaspirella in Tampa and Jabil in St. Pete who knows how our lives will feel kicked out to a street?

Reverting and spinning in the unknown to make a call JBA on a cable and we pull up into a Texas stall, to horse-up and tie-up and pull to the bar for a drink and girl says aren’t you that same string of events lined up round the block, the kid and his wife with a little girl just trying to get a spot at a new life, without fear of the scene and all you could tell her is I am a frayed that is knot what you are seeing.

All you say today is that, “I am a girl trapped under toe of a man dragging his daughter under his hand to Dallas and the four-hundred square miles of concrete Earth carved out from the cattle to fly Southwest and burst out into tears of where lives have come unraveled.” 

Away from the mess and collecting the half-paychecks for piles of uncertainty for Penelope for us for what we had left to expect back there on the front of another summer coming down the pike.  How did we know Gustav would not destroy what rebuilding from Katrina might have left behind?

It is an honest question I asked a dozen times in thoughts of protection.  Now I feel you blame me for putting your hand in a fire and no matter the truth it cries out as a kidnapping in my darkest hour.

Glistening in eye with your mother’s connections and spies at coffee shop counters like Sauron or white witch crows and cigarettes burned all of the sewing circle secrets we could learn.  Owners were in cities in coordination of what was not even asking to be sold.  To grow with our family a stone’s throw from your parent’s home. 

To live with your Hingle’s to build our own castle with porches and grass.   To sit on and cut in our nineties and watch our grandchildren pass the torch up the mast of marriage for we had sailed across that sea staking those moorings.  You mutinied me.

We poured those slabs constructing a home.  Your dreams of the country, ice tea on wood planks, and riding lawn mowers and prison shanks.  We set foot in Camelot.  You slammed the door.

I was the bastard dragging you to this life where you could be the corporate controller of Main Street and curry out favors.  You have your re-united quartet, string up a quintet with our daughter and push me out the Expedition for now your life could unveil its true mission.

No more Southwest.  No more Katrina house, construction complete and shove Ethan offstage we can begin to begin Ashley’s star paved as the actress.

Never have to claim ownership of her love for a man because he never asked for evidence despite the battery of waves against the walls of the ship, out there on the oceans he felt so well-equipped for he had no doubt to take the beatings.

It was all honest; the push on his chest.  Ear in the breaths of the siren’s rock calls.  I did not need to receive a love letter to give my all.  I thought we were partners holding the ropes, but now the siren is unmasked and I am grasping the scope of your charge into our home to tear out my heart.

Throw it right back at me to explode.  I feel the aorta and the chambers like Jello-red fish-skins fresh cut flapping against my face as you stare at me as jester with your thoughts re-arranged.  No longer are you sorry or apologetic.  No longer are you saying you are going to hell for this.

Now out in public you catapult questions to cast me as a controlling bastard who you were forced to live with.  You swept it under that rug like a sweet pea with smiles learned from your mother to temper the father like coins in a fountain to not disrupt the volcano god.  You play the virgin you say you are bound and plummeting to magma, but instead you bark sounds.

Oh, how they will accept you.  Oh, how they will understand that you are not a terrorist, but a liberator taking hold of your freedom.  What will you tell them next?  That I have so many un-named monsters in my closet and I keep them in places where no one can see, but at the trial of my life’s dignity you will unleash them?

Worst of all you take on the role of adjudicator flying on angel-dust on your Neverland flight dictating the schedule of my true post-apocalyptic life.  You have sequestered my daughter and decreed the days that I can see her and told me the ways, you will allow.

What universe are you in, this one nation in divisible by God or by Ashley?  You call out to say that two nights a month is the life Penelope and I will play out in your puppet-string game of emotion.  I am only allowed to respond when you see fit.  You put on your litigious robes blank of devotion to truth or who you know that I am, but to portray me as the overlord or your white-witch Narnia-land.

I am a good father, husband and man to have you defame me is an injustice and stands only to document your massive hypocritical need for control of how the perception of the inter-workings of our family’s life will unfold out into the humid hot air of Nottoway. 

You seek friends to defy the physics of the gravity of truth.  Loyalty bombed in a roadside excuse.  You claim that I was just some spectator in Penelope’s life is like saying I stayed asleep the last five years of this strife you claim to have endured and it is all my responsibility because you could not take how I snored. 

I am not just some outsider who has thrown mud on the sweet-pea princess as if she has no requirement to retort the massive trove of questions I have held in my stores that your voice-mail and email so reluctantly seem to ignore. 

What lies will you spin when the courtroom slams the door on our future of the time and schedule of our child?  How will you face her at thirteen when she questions your path?  Will she see the detonator in your nightstand or the halo on your hat rack?

Which actions can you never take back?  What will she believe when you try to pass her some half-truth, some mixed up, “It was just something we had to do,” kind of answer?”

Will you supply truth to her questions of what her father had done to earn such crippling rewards, under the weight of the wreckage run ashore?  Will you recall the siren song you use to sing, to recant the lyrics of “Yes I will wear this ring, for better or worse, for sicker or poorer to put you first above all others?”

Which role will you teach her comes first, wife or mother?  What happens the day Penelope finds her way to some man that will love her and asks for her hand?  What happens when she moves away, to not live a stone’s throw from your backyard, what will you say?  Will you sabotage him just to hold onto her? 

I guess that is a pain that I can not let you debate, because I will always be there as her father in life to give her the freedoms and self-confidence despite how you claim that I crush her spirit and soul, but how I know you are just projecting your father’s role onto me as your husband and me as her father.

How sad it is that you were not shown a better example.  You have thrown away all the complimentary gala apples that I had to give.  I will begin to grow for another as the seasons will change and you can rot hungry in your infertile orchard still playing your game. 

I have fed you and fed you and crab apple-raised you into a fat-bloated monster of conceit filled with your own misguided beliefs that you have no culpability, no rigor in your limbs from your half-dead zombie pretend.

You never valued my soul for its blanket to keep you warm from the storms that have passed through to support you with hands, a bowl of my love, for you to pour your life’s troubles to hold like a dove on a twig tied with a message to deliver across battlefields.

To save a life’s wreckage, I have given you my all, and in place of gratitude you thrust me off our life’s building just to watch me fall stories upon stories stretching a mile down with bean-words vapid of caring about to shatter against the ground like a billion blood-pellet spheres rearranged.

Circles have ended when you cast off my name, as if it were a yoke you had to bare.  Can you please tell anyone the truth about the weight that was not there?

I love her too much to leave a gap in the seams to abandon thorn-stitched memories.  Inside the sewing and twine run amuck is her little life blooming in the middle stuck.

She knows nothing of the sorrow I hold in my payments of patience to temper the anger bursting from the betrayal of my fallen angel scoffing with her sword dripping in passive aggression, blow by blow an internal repression.

She knows nothing of my scars like ten-thousand stars off in a distance from Earth out in a magnanimous perch, swollen and bursting and gargantuan consequence, but to my Penelope on the ground I have to make it look like nothingness.

I can not let her see you with the sword in your hand or the wound in my chest, because I have to give her a childhood with two parents with smiles to collect.

Oh your delight to mask for the world and set the sands of the Sahara under your rug, to take Atlas’s weight on my shoulders to shrug off your choices like dandruff flakes. 

You are the smiling mouse at the front of the class, begging the haberdasher teacher to praise you and ask, “How do you do it?  You have it all together.” Ashley is always smiling no matter if the weather is cloudy or gray.  No matter if you just carved your husband’s heart out with a spade, and chucked it for turkey vultures to devour in the street like Mrs. Lovett’s pies oozing with meat.

How you just want them all to believe, nothing is wrong except I abused you, you have the house on the hill with a reason proved, to your little blueberry-world that I was the poor-postured monster and you were the girl trapped in the tower, flaccid and starved incapable of calling out, until your final alarm.

Run, run, run to daddy and mommy back in your homeland, how you will not even consider it lying when you get on the stand.

Victimization exudes every word.  I held you under that glass to take all of your turns for you in this monopoly game.  I sent you to jail without a chance for you to ever proclaim the life you say you never got, but why can’t you pause for a minute, why can’t you stop?

Despite my impressions, my version of truth and your tales, your try to Rapunzel-repel down will fail.  Ropes of hair-brained lies break.  Down will come Humpty.  Out come the eggs black in their center hardened with time.  No matter how many tiny Dutch spoons and cups you procure they are still rancid inside.

The seasoning and texture will freak out all the king’s men.  You should be the one defending your life for all of your sins.  But I have not got the gall to do that to you, to propose to Penelope a consequence correlated with the truth.

Pay for your sins in monetary supplements and visitation weekends, these should be the variables of your equation to be forced to the brink of emotion to debate.

But no my compassion for her has all been twisted around, in the neutering assumptions of gender and you demand I am unfit, I am a Charlatan a beggar a thief, a man unworthy of offering you an equitable reprieve.

From what would seem logically fair, an offer a compromise, for her sake and share her life to have us equal and at peace, but no that is not enough.  You have to come over and reach to my side of the plate and scrape off the bones, suck out the marrow and claw until you have shown the world your inequitable haul that justifies your actions, and replaces your gall with a righteous war for the soul of our family and your victorious spoils.

Such innocence and vapid recognition of the coins you hold in your purse thirty pieces of silver to ward off the curse, wrinkles ironed out with your ghastly power suit, stockings and man-chin, never an indent, an avenue to come in to your center, to let in the words, to let in compassion or criticism for any of your cabinet to learn.

Who you really are or what you have done, just a cold-hearted assassin with frosted windows and a chubby belly beneath, like a lard-laden lady strolling her master suite, pick up your scepter, tiara, and rings.

Take up head of your bedroom-court of closet space and window coverings, of extra bed pillows chucked to the floor.  Your single-bedroom subjects craving for more, more of your wisdom and round about chats, How lovely it is to be home at last, All of these fabrics to tickle your back, Compare histories of poor treatment kept in brown paper sacks to pull out when convenient to say what you knew to live out your make-believe life in the home of the shrew.

I try to grow a scab, you yank it off, After three days, platelets can not placate a broken heart,  Blood cells rush like armored soldiers to apply an epoxy of manly courage and fatherly advice. 

My sensibilities are abandoned like a cannon ball of digits I unearth the wound before fecundity can set in to grow a new me for the infantry to admire with all his regal atonement to slay his inner-demon dragon-heart love.  

Maybe I could forget all the stab wounds and your fingerprints on the handle twisting a blade into Penelope’s life bifurcated into an anomaly of my yesterday.  Despite knowing I must asphyxiate my love for you like an inert gas that if brought to open air will serve toxic to my care. 

The vision I see of you blurs like a murky turtle pond of seaweed to abscond my memory behind a green and black field of tree roots and cellulose.  I was scuba diving for pennies in the swamp gripping for the elbow of an alligator, inside a charcoal atmosphere.  All I see are swirls of crimson clouds ascending looking down at my fingertips missing and severed limbs.  Your reptile skin has swallowed me in.

My heart is completely broken, yet digested whole I can no longer feel my bowl of hands that I dreamed could hold your words.  My incapability is now secondary to my non-necessity.

My broken flesh will provide vapid nourishment inside the entrails of your decision.  You can undulate your tale through the liquid memories of how all your voter database will recount the days, but all I have is one in my electorate.

A single brown haired endorsement, coloring pictures with crayons of rose.  Of her and I and our blue sky drifting up and up with all our windows shut to your scriptures

Condescending tower descend your hair this shadowed prince is but a new pawn to pinch.  Logic in crumbs, chickens are coming in for the night and nesting the trail back to real life.  The hell you have earned is coming with robed men on horses barreling at gates, knocking down your logic like grass blades. 

A stay of execution for your Frankenstein reality sitting in court, seated in silence three more months before the waves of my words can break upon the shores of your sandcastle foaming at the gates like a tide that has learned to wait, for the moon and the gravity and the pull of the day.

When the blindfolded sloth sees your fish shit catapulted off the scales, when I add the golden weight of my words your silver-seaweed lies will blacken absurd, Shrivel and wither away in the wind I will stand tall and let the fresh air back in to my lungs gazing over the ocean, My new life will sail on emotion solid in ground.  You can finally acknowledge regret, over your silenced attacking sounds.

358

I had so many questions and prognostications about what seemed logical given the film strips processed by my hippocampus.  Poetry was an archaic tool. Poetry was nauseating. Poetry was the industry of blacksmiths, hide tanners, icemen, lamp lighters, typists, bowling pin setters, VHS, manual elevator operators, and milkmen.  Rhyme multiplied the vomit.  I wanted to understand how a man could be divested of his daughter because a woman chose to abandon her marriage like a flick of a switch. 

Ashley took away my innocence, my carte blanche of a first carnal love owed like a Biblical feminine virgin.  Ashley’s rebellion emasculated me to see my love like fermented menstruation, foul in stench and chemically foreign, an anomaly from my system breeding bacterium on the sidewalk for her town to see.  However, the locals did not recognize this pile for its true self, but arbitrated in the immediacy of appearances of gender and blood.  How could this not be a travesty born by the scourge of testosterone?  A child is sequestered.  A wife is in tears.  A man is closeted in the ignominy of dining on his foul chutney for a crime of despotism in his white porch castle.

The path to this point was irrelevant.  Some couples argue bitterly for years, fighting and demeaning each other into whittled toothpick bones of former selves.  I was grateful for the ambush.  I had no use for a Kevorkian option.  Cancer surfaced and dropped me dead from a Sunday night to a Monday evening.  Pai Mei’s five point palm exploding heart technique, I was dead by the third heart beat, before the fifth step.  I had no prolonged stay in hospice or a hospital clamp-down radiating organs. 

Logic visited my mind on occasion.  I was a good father.  Facts had to matter to someone other than a notebook or a mirror.  History could not be totally obliterated into Nottoway land pixie-peanut dust conjecture and sanctimonious rage.  Could it?