I want to run around that yard,
batting my hands against my father’s grapevines,
stomping through his garden,
my hands sticky with blackberries.

I want to see the bricked patio behind my room,
where I kicked and punched with glee
after the cheesy karate movie
we went to go see.

I want to stand in the spot where the bee stung,
and I want to sneak past the corner with the dead bird,
avoiding the hole where dad fell during kickball,
and we went running for mom.

And I don’t want to go next door, and
I don’t want to see the backyard with the beast,
the loud dog the bit me and gave me this scar.
I don’t need to go there.

And maybe Snowball the cat’s ghost still purrs,
stalking the backyard where I played ping pong,
and where I tossed a ball through a window,
and where I kept a turtle in the garage.

I know the yard is still there, and maybe
lots of other little boys have played there,
and maybe they’ve laughed and cried,
and shot arrows at their bratty little sister too.

I know it would seem so small to me now,
so miniature compared to the place in my mind,
but I still want to run around that yard,
my hands sticky with blackberries.

I pulled my truck into the savings and loan,
set the brake, turned the key, and cried,
cried for the love I could not have,
cried like a man alone.

I cried because I thought he would rescue me
from the loneliness of divorce,
but none of it was real to him,
his care was just a sport.

Both my absent loves cut to the marrow bone,
with knotted knives of lust and lies,
sitting in a bank parking lot
crying by myself, alone.

I fold my undershirts neatly into two piles
and wear them in order everyday.

I load the dishwasher with cups on the same side,
dishes and pots and pans juxtaposed below.

The shorts are packed in boxes this off season,
plaid and plain and cargo and linen and playful.

My ties wrap around pegs, hovering with their color kin,
locked in a staring contest with my belts of varying lengths.

And I wait for my prize,
the gold star I was long promised.

And I wait for it to be all right,
for the truth to be delivered.

And I wait for the secret to be told,
for the big reveal from above.

And I wait for the passion to erupt,
destroying my world and its cruel deceptions,
its lies and its deceits and its poverty,
and its crude black infections.

I pray for the light to crash down about me,
to obliterate my enemies and my sins,
to capture my orderly soul, and
gnaw its bones clean from within.

My dress shirts hang with collars in one direction,
by color coordinated, dark to light.

Pulled under by debts and doubts,
reaching a middle life
with so much and so little to show,
and to not know if his words will ever fork lightning.

Forgotten tales weaved by sweet smiles,
stories of promise,
swimming past in cool, blue currents,
as his giant head bobbed to sleep slowly.

It was youth and folly, fully formed,
fleeing from the green open pastures,
flinging to the ashen streets,
with the buildings covered in mean dust and dreams arrested.

It was the astral projection, the star light
drumming about the dark,
punching through him, past him, rocketing through
a profound parade, a might, a power to behold.

And he danced, and he danced wildly,
in circles around he flailed,
battering the filthy walls as they closed in,
a neat shrinking box for his sin.

And finally it was Night that hovered over him,
in him,
only at peace at rest,
only asleep in his tiny black nest.

His dreams chewed him up and spat him about the room,
tumbling down, covered in the grime,
the time of ill winds and formless fears,
a rotten tomb.

And he was small and naked,
his giant head bobbing again and again,
recalling the old songs of beauty and light,
alone in the middle of the night.

It’s more than time that we part;
a black and consuming refrain,
a malignant corner of my heart.

We danced a dark, foul step,
an ever growing, ugly stain;
at twisting, you were cruelly adept.

You clutched and grabbed greedily,
shackling me in my own disdain,
from truth, me fleeing speedily.

No more plays, no more fancy tales,
no more escapes from the sane;
a conclusion there is time to tell.

The dark dream has reached its end,
no more happiness only to feign,
onto the business of a heart to mend.

Do not call, do not plead or pray,
I am deaf to your wrongs explained,
in this gross fiction I no longer stay.

Repeated over and over without end,
the false dream I truly maintained,
from an honest love it upends.

But no more, nevermore, evermore,
a final chill chorus for my bane,
a new light, I have, to love and explore.