Fatherly Conversation

Father you want to know why I am in such a rush

If taking five years to get to here and still not close to a start is too fast

Then I guess speed is relative to a man who has been with the same woman since eighteen

How the conversation goes, I live with my grandmother in the house my father grew up

I share a bedroom with a straggling storage hoard of stashed trinkets and textiles

My father’s old room he spray-painted, “It’s all bullshit!” behind the wallpaper to his dad’s ire

Is the repository for the framed art of my former homes and garbage bags of migration

My daughter occasionally wanders over, but the longer I go the more I feel like

I am a mental father in her mind, akin to a deceased person who she cannot see, touch or feel

But in staggered interface so that for the preponderance I am absent but in these phrases

And tokens of leadership, love, and guidance I can bestow in smiles, folly, and sincerity

So even when I am with her I still feel a bit like a dead man like we are both watching our lives

Play back on a tape recorder as if for me to feel alive in this other paradigm we each must be

A manner in our shared windows like Persephone and spring time

And I am not sure which side of Hades the season is foretelling

Even the utterance of her existence, let alone the actual deceased

Prompts the quandary of the why such battlefields and marches parade in place of waterholes

On a sexual savannah which would have been better training for this current endeavor

The man sparks to an electric feel crimpled on a bookshelf

Reading in the wait that any of this is magical or an expectation of the solstice

Will ever taste differently; so that yes father I want to find home

And for that I need a house after being unchained from the Indian-town rock for the buzzards

I wish to find a pleasant garden to plant root with all these seed burs in my socks

For until the cardboard is unpacked and the frames rehung I see no way to start the conversation

I would rather be having  

You see I am not too proud to admit I am still too weak

I am embarrassed by my life, where I am and been and so

I am doing what need be done to be a man materialized, present

At the cost of is and is not me, knowing there is only the whole

No matter how talks may sever tongues into twisted amalgamations of illusion

I am all these tales spun into an emperor’s or pauper’s identical nudity