Sometimes I dream of my father
wandering, as if he seeks
some nocturnal phantom in the brush.
 
The sudden lighting of a torch
brings the clarity of day.
At its base is a dark stone,
smooth and blank yet
familiar, somehow significant.
He drives the torch into the ground as if
nothing has happened and
continues to amble through
the featureless expanse. Each time
 
I awaken and rush to his room, only
to find the same manic eyes staring
back, devoid of that vital essence.
His words come from some
other place. I walk away from the man
less real to me than his memory
and retire to a troubled sleep
head heavy with hope for a flame
too strong to be extinguished.

I recall the man. Sweet, always smiling as in that oak-framed photo above the fire, with that solid stance of a marbled statue and the elevated dignity to match. Now, far beyond his prime, he sits. Still. A frail prisoner to the television, the only sweetness left in the last amber drops at end of the glass – the beginning of the next? – a man delirious from drink and all the rust of long life. Still. Waiting for the sleep.
 
How the passions go slack, subtly, with passing days.

I, suspended
briefly in a deep crevice
of the grooves of time
bow my head in worship
to the drowning static,
gently slanted minor chords
lingering then subtly slipping
from frequency
to frequency, brush
strokes of blue, violet.
I, breathless
until the world again
turns, ending another
tiny eternity.

Back home, the snowflakes    flitter
                                                         down 
                                                               languidly
as if avoiding the sameness of the blanket below.
 
The fragrance of black coffee,
a conversation in subtle tones, and
Miles Davis’s smoothest meanderings
waft in from the study.
 
Bruise-blue flames give the room
a soft glow, lending a gentle luster to the cat’s
matte black fur, spine arched in luxurious mid-stretch.
 
Back flush to the ground, I take it all in with
young eyes, young ears, hungry for those
sensory delights. Soon, the flames
 
fade into simmering, lightless embers,
as the final barely-blown note dwindles.
She whispers “goodnight” in that familiar, hushed
voice, ending a vivid memory with a sweet refrain.

Some people never return
their parents’ haggard and beaten
voicemails – it’s been months – while
some drive drunk (and brag.) Some
forfeit to lust and sleep with a friend’s girlfriend
while some swerve toward the oblivious possum.
 
I do none of these things – well, maybe
one – but we all have ***** laundry.
Those little specters of intention
and actions not taken that eat at us
– some of us – like a consuming flame
blinding to its unfortunate kindling
while invisible to others.
 
And yet we worry.
 
That on judgment day he won’t
skim over the ****-stained briefs
that our secrets are scribbled on
our foreheads, or that other people
are actually people with lives
complex as ours and it’s wrong
******* them over like that.

Nic fits, the little fluctuations
in my otherwise flat emotional
geography. Twenty fatal hour
glasses daily, dividing the time
    filling empty space
with their swirling whisps.
 
Brown-stained fingers fish
out another from a limp
soft-pack. Another disposable
morsel, tip kissed with another
disposable BIC, torched down
to the filter by another disposable
“I,” then cast into the gutter—
with the rest.
 
(Then a fit of hacking like steel striking
 birch quashes any implicit poetry.)