Convo at Thirty-Six

As an adult seeing my parents on a more equal footing

I realize that they have had no idea who their own son is

What his life in their house was like let alone outside the walls post residence

My mother typically refers to how I appeared on the outside

Smiles or playing with my toys attempting to indemnify her guilt-streaked blinders

My father makes jokes about my physical stature or structure as being sufficient

To allay any related concerns as if the production factory of his scrotum

Could somehow not produce this mass of cellular material

Staring him in the face at thirty-six expressing the depth of just how dark it got

What big brother was; was not, feeling like his enemy from birth one

Punching bag, saliva blob bombed down throat knees over elbows

When they would leave on weekends evacuating

Recognizing how much I needed a guide knowing I got a detour

As if good grades or participation in a notebook writing club of one

Was sufficient to rationalize understanding of a boy being on track

The word ASPIE did not register to an educational diagnostician mother

The sheer breadth of alone from age zero to twenty one was

Like a roach infestation under the countertop scurrying in daylight

There behind the walls of a bulwark of punk rock and poem pages

Stacking for conversations like prayers that could not exhale anywhere but ink

Read by the author and recycled praying that the idea of what life could be

Involved evolving past this conundrum of why and how humans converse

As if when one displays interest the retort of silence is not automatic

The words that escape a labyrinth throat are so mangled and gnarled

By the time of arrival in the station of the villager’s ears that ogres

Are merely gawked at for a blink and a head turn as if the eruption of syllables

Was dream-talk balancing in crumbling towers of sand missed by no one

Licked by the sea as a daily tide so that the purpose of external extension

Becomes retraction for every reach-out by year equates to a slink-in

So that at thirty-six the man is staring at his mother and father

So far into the Marianas that his translucent spoken as his normal sounds alien to them

As it always has