She clutches a toothless baby,
posing stiffly before a tacky blue backdrop,
standing faithfully
beside my indifferent father—
a dormant madness
written subtly into
the lines of his face,
smothered
by suburban stoicism.

But her impeccably tailored grin,
which beams predictably
from the outstretched lips
of every frustrated housewife,
screams the words
forever condemned to silence:
“******* it, Andy,
for the good of our family,
couldn’t you at least pretend
to be happy about something?”

But what she didn’t realize
is that for far too long,
he did.

The whole concept
of adulthood
is one that seems to
trespass
from the ever-anticipated world
of the theoretical,
just to barge into your life
one night
like an uninvited drunken friend.

It will never really “hit you,”
but it’ll come **** close
the first time your aunt
offers you a glass of wine
as she and your mother
gossip frankly about
your father’s mistress—
you sip on cheap Chardonnay
and pretend to be used to the taste,
as they talk with
a middle-aged bitterness
of the man you were raised
to believe was too virtuous
to be in debt for some glitzy
engagement ring that he
bought to restart his life
with a woman he left your mother for
shortly after the pandemonium
of a guiltless affair.
The man
whose brutishness
you were told to overlook, cradling
the sparse memories
of when he’d tuck you
too tightly into bed, or
when he’d tell you that he loved you
even though half the time
you really didn’t believe him—
The man whose love confused you,
whose clumsy attempts
of fatherhood
kept the heart of a young girl
perpetually guarded
by a cautious skepticism—
The man who brought you into
a world he found absurd
as carelessly
as he raised you to face it,
torn apart
like every illusion that makes a child,
the ashes of which
that slip through your fingers
inevitably declare you
another bitter adult.

More wine will reveal
that your beloved father
is a controlling ******
and his relationship
with that *****
the whole family hates
only appears to be functioning
because she lets him have
all the control
he couldn’t exert on your mother,
even though you’ve had dinner
with the two of them a couple of times
and if you had met her
under any other circumstance (though
you’d feel like a traitor
if you said it aloud)
you wouldn’t think
she was all that bad.

In red, declarative letters
I want to write to any children I may ever bear
into this bittersweet game of *******
we play that we’ve since called ‘life,’
that when they first gaze with awe
at the unattainable grace
with which every grown-up seems to navigate
the world they created,
with all the pain of tax-paying and womanhood,
I want to scream
that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing either
and if at any point I try to convince you otherwise
you should tell your mother
that she’s full of ****.

I’ve always had certain
thoughts
that manifest as forbidden plays
performed privately only in
a mental stage
I always swore
to keep unspoken,
unwritten and
eternally unprocessed
in hopes that
keeping it ineffable
and far away from explanation
would shield it from the
soul-draining burden
of legitimacy.

But the longer
I keep these things
an embarrassing secret,
and the longer I insist
that in my every thought
lies shame best kept suppressed,
the more I realize
that maybe the reason that I,
like every animate creature
stumbling through their earthly existence,
have come to condemn an abrasive world
for never understanding me,
stems from every human’s destructive habit
of refusing to understand the parts of ourselves
the world will never accept.

And what we never realize
is that we are the world—
sponsoring our own
oppression and feeling as responsible
as every snowflake in the avalanche.

From the inception of our lives,
once sheltered
by the innocent warmth of the womb,
we wake to bright hospital lights
and our groaning mothers.

From the inception every day,
out from our hazy world of dreams
cocooned in the comfort of a familiar bed,
we rise with reluctance
to the frigid morning air.

Alarm clocks routinely ending
comfort we were never aware of
until we knew the bitterness
of being exposed to the world.

I think it’s the sickest
part of our wiring
that the things we
long for the most intensely,
with the deepest
and most poignant ache
of the soul
are always the things
we’ve already told ourselves
will never return.

you are
the puddle after the rain
the love that remains
the last animate ember
in a numb and unconscious soul
and I can still smell the smoke
long after you’ve been gone

We’re the glaring definition
of absurdity—everything
felt right when it wasn’t time.
Nothing
ever fell into place
under any sacred principle
of nature— we declared
our own laws
just to break them.
Like sadistic gods, we
established a beautiful world
and destroyed it, just to
fruitlessly reanimate
the salvaged ruins
after we inevitably
change our minds.

We dance to our own song
perpetually
out of time— and if any chord
happens to resonate, one of us
will always be
just one blatant
half-step away
from any satisfaction
of harmony.

You say what would fix us
is a metronome, but
you and I both know
that it’s awfully pointless
when neither of us
will ever stay faithful
to a tempo.