My hands are calloused, cracked from clinging tightly
to threads unraveling deep in the dusk of night.
Each breath I borrow bears a rusted weight,
a sigh unscreamed, a twist of tethered fate.
I am the yoke where hope was once affixed,
now fraying ropes and gears that won’t be fixed.

She wept again, with no warning in the wind,
just silence steeped in loss she dared not mend.
The third goodbye to something less than whole,
each pink slip torn, another unpaid toll.
And still I rise…
These two graves I dig with time,
one for my youth, and one for the end of my time.

There is no shore that meets me when I sleep,
just oceans filled with debts I cannot keep.
The ceiling talks in creaks and static threats,
each bulb above me flickers cold regrets.
What kind of man can break and still pretend
he’s steel? When every bend forewarns the end.
My child dreams while I dissolve in dawn,
a phantom father pressed beneath a pawn.
I hold her laughter like a lung holds air, as if it’s the last one I will get.
Much too tight, afraid the gasp will not be there.
My wife, eyes blank, a porcelain betrayed,
stares past the walls where once her colors shown true.
O God, my God or ghost of echoing ache,
how many nights until the sinews break?
Each shift, each tick of the clock that mocks the efforts you forsake,
pulls marrow from a man who’s already dead.
Yet still I smile, wide as a wound can smile,
and walk that extra, graveled, grimy mile.

But I am rust. I am the scream unshed
The faithful mule they’ll work until he’s bled.
There is no balm, no savior’s whispered song.
There’s only me, and I won’t last for long.

There is a hole now.
Not torn, not ripped
but hollowed.
Like wind wore down the center of me
with soft, persistent cruelty.
No thunderclap,
just the slow erosion
of something that once stood watch.
You were barely more than breath,
a flicker in the straw,
a warm weight that made morning feel
intentional.
And I
the one who named myself protector
looked away.
That is all it took.
One glance elsewhere,
and the universe took back its loan.
I did not cry out when it happened.
There was no sound left in me.
Only the sick realization
that absence has a shape.
That love leaves residue.
That I was the architect of your undoing.
Now the days come blank.
Food tastes like guilt.
The sky is heavy with things I cannot fix.
My hands. these hands
they shake, not from fear,
but from knowing they could have stopped it.
How many heartbeats have passed
since yours didn’t?
Time moves, but I do not follow.
I sit within the rift,
counting all the ways I failed you
a thousand imagined rescues
playing out too late,
too slow.
There is no metaphor here.
No phoenix in the ashes.
Just me,
and the grave I dug
with the illusion of safety.
Hope feels obscene now,
as if it doesn’t remember
who you were.
And I am tired.
So deeply tired.
Because to love something,
and then lose it
to your own neglect,
is to live each moment afterward
as punishment.

She was once the ink of poems.
Now, she is the blot that bleeds
Through every page I try to keep clean.
A mirror I simply cannot trust;
As its fragile glass that always screams when held.
I bear the weight of two homes.

I recline in a chair of brittle oak,
Fashioned from fragments of lost endeavor.
Cloaked in silence, the air itself awoke,
Bearing whispers, dust-bound forever.

His hands no longer chart unknown seas,
The maps of youth long frayed and worn.
Quiet tomes rest like sleeping trees,
Pages hushed in binding shorn.

Through glass, dim twilight bleeds regret,
Ivory panes painted pale with grief.
Garments draped in sorrows set,
Each clasp marks memories brief.

Hours drift, strangers to his face,
Dust spins unsure, in circles slow.
Garbed in remnants of lost grace,
In one exhausted body.
A pair of shoes that never rest.
A heart that negotiates treaties
With broken logic and manic thunder,
Just to keep the child from hearing
How close the sky is to falling.

She does not know of gratitude.
Only gravity.
She does not fold laundry;
She folds reality
To fit her comfort,
While I bleed time into corners,
Hoping peace grows like moss
Where no light reaches.

And Still…
I do NOT break.

There were nights I folded into myself
A silence not of peace, but pause,
Where memory clung like sweat to old Regrets,
And the dark was just thick enough to Speak.
A younger version of me still walks there,
Half-shouting at ghosts,
Half-sure he knows better.

The road I paved was not always stone…
Sometimes glass,
Sometimes the brittle hush of unspoken Apologies.
My hands, calloused from more than labor,
Have carried the sharp edges of Consequence,
Have held a child’s future like a fragile flame
And nearly dropped it once or twice.

Fatherhood did not come with a compass.
It came like weather,
Sudden and vast;
With no promise of shelter, only sky.
And still, I stepped out.
Still, I walked.

There were questions I answered with my Absence,
Lessons I taught by stumbling.
And yet each tear I have dried
Has felt like redemption.
Each scraped knee, a liturgy
In the cathedral of trying again.

You learn that love,
Real love,
Isn’t found in the perfection of the path
But in turning back for the small hand that Trusts you still.

Now, she laughs.
And in her laughter is a map
Of every right thing I did
Despite myself.

And I know,
No matter how far I wandered from grace,
It was worth it.
Not for a second chance,
But for the first time I truly listened
To what love sounds like
When it calls you “Dad.”

There are times where I’m not myself.
I walk and stroll the passerby’s
With foreign eyes
To see if they can tell.
I am a lie of omission.
Not quite the truth.
A bit of a straight arrow,
With flavorings of the uncouth.
I’m not healthy for you,  
(nor would I want to be.)
I am unattainable,
I am fiction,
I am fable.