It was around that age
When young soldiers begin
To grab hold of the world around them
in hopes of moulding their wings,
That he was met with silence.
That echoes cackled,
Crackling against the walls
Of his mother’s house,
Whispering secrets that speak with
The knowledge of a world that
Lived Before the empty rooms and picture frames.
Before home was a safe space for two,
And he woukdnt think twice
about befriending the stranger half of his name.
You see
For Little man….
Father was “him”,
a string of tales told, then cut cold,
Once he was old enough to shoulder the hymns.
Hed follow the djinn
Into whirls of make believe
to prise the gospel of a ghost from the relics
That littered their home.
An old watch,
A broken guitar and
his mother’s broken smile.
She sang sweetness into a stale story of kinship.
Sip by sip
Offering peace
A lucid liquors of speach
To Blur the lines of a character
Long since removed from action
Too broken a fraction to make whole
Every story told
Seemed mightier than the man frozen behind the frames
Folded under her tongue was a name
She learned to handle with care.
She sang
A crooked verse.
She sang
To settle his soul.
Sang to settle his soles,
His feet,
Were teeth,
Chewing up ever mile of yarn she spun,
Pacing to piece together pictures
Of the world before the silence.
She sang to seal the silence.
Singing
Until the sliding scales of her fiction
Settled into soured notes
And silence choked her diction
A friction yoked her
victim to the boats we rock
When we venture out in search of new worlds
The sickness of a sea
Sewn into peaks and valleys
She would have gladly kept hidden.
But still,
He was always the last one dancing when the music stopped
Always the last one sipping at the bittersweet tonic,
Of a time gone by.
Not yet introduced to the weight of the morning after the fact.
His mother
mused in melodies fraught with confusion,
Tracing her notes with care to show his father was no illusion.
Yes his father always moving,
And its hard to pin down shooting stars,
Just to save him something to wish for.
The Cadences in her carry ons of this phantom faced kin,
We’re wild with dissonance,
clouding his innocence,
Sometimes
I think,
she thought
He was him.
Because
He has his eyes, they say,
He has his lies,
they say,
He has his,
spirit,
but there is nothing in it
Because he can’t remember his ways.
The man was a fugitive.
Always on the run.
Avoiding in laws, never involved in trials,
Slipping into the night seeking solace in gile,
he knew the exits well.
Exit wounds swelled with reasons for his
leaving and never knowing him well.
The cloak and dagger deviant, cut the holes in family ties.
He left a home that taught the bond that only family ties.
You see
For Little
Father was always “him”,
a string of tales, told, then cut cold,
When I was old enough to shoulder the hymns.
But
He will be always tied to his truth.
He is his father son,
And everyday I worry what that would means for him.
Because
He has MY eyes they say
But shouls he should have MY lies
They say he has MY spirit
But there is nothing in it
If I cannot show him the way.
I have paraded with patch work pride
So as to hide my broken half.
Walking the four corners
To fork honour
Into a mouth full of words I can share
With this budding king
Blood and kin of a fool
I wish I knew
How a jester can do just
To be a gesture of love and legacy.
He’s been looking for a father,
I have been looking for sense.
I have shattered so many memories
In his mother’s heart
Why would I wait and watch start
To paint his pride on they way I did.
Watch my seed twist into the crooked sun
Of his father fire
I am tired
Of watching broken men
Raising broken sons.
I am tired
I am broken
I am “Him”
